Is it a movie about a pending breaking-up? A young woman (Buckley) contemplating about splitting from her boyfriend Jake (Plemons), whom she has been dated for six weeks (or in that ballpark), but she has already accepted an invitation to dine at his parent's countryside house for the first time (saying “yes” is far easier than “no”), but don't expect any MEET THE PARENTS goofiness in the offing, in Charlie Kaufman's I'M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS, it is a jaunt full of question marks, reality bizarrely and cumulatively morphs into un-reality (like time passes through people). Who is this young woman anyway? (whose name and occupation keep changing) and the main plot is punctuated by a byplay about a high school janitor (Boyd), what is the connection here?
I'M THINKING… inherits Kaufman's cerebral, perspective-shifting, logic-discarding (interestingly his protagonists scarcely question their own sanity in the face of unthinkable circumstances) hallmarks, his surreal conceit can be pertinently referred as “mundane”, it is not that the elements he constructs are eerily otherworldly or unsettlingly paranormal (David Lynch is the doyen in this regard), but the way how those everyday or pedestrian actions are concatenated, that defies our rational expectation and their yawning inconsistency indicates a dreamlike existence. Here, the age of Jake's parents (Thewlis and Colette, the latter is peculiarly mesmerizing in her delectable, chameleon-like affectations) inexplicably seesaws within a dinner's time; the woman cannot see the face of Jake's family dog (which keeps jiggling),and find her own childhood picture hanging on the wall of Jake's parents' farmhouse; cryptical messages are uttered by a waitress (Quinn, carrying off a memorable cameo duty) of an ice cream parlor during a blizzard night. They are all telltale signs of that the only plausible explanation is that there is a metafictional wire-puller.
When the plot arrives at its third act, the janitor's tributary finally converges into the artery, a dream ballet rendition in the school hallway, the woman's tremulous admission of her “reality” in front of the janitor, she cannot remember what Jake looks like, their first encounter isn't romantic at all, that we ascertain the janitor is the aging Jake, and the woman is what he imagines as “the ideal one” who embodies all the virtues he wants for a wife, but the gaping remove between reality and fantasy is so hurtfully dispiriting, Jake, the janitor is a sad sack who isn't talent enough to make good, but a diligent highbrow fritters his life away, old, overweight and alone, forgotten by the world.
If the film genuinely suggests Kaufman's solicitude respecting the misery of intellectuals in our shallow society, where sapiosexuals are hard to find, spiritual elation is obliterated by materialistic yearning, the testimonial (“the woman behind a successful man” trope is a tad passé) and the switch of our focus point from the woman to Jake unwisely expose Kaufman's own navel-gazing and regressive self-pity, Nobel Prize is everyman's ultimate holy grail? Even in his saddo's fantasy, Kaufman's own standing is over the hoi polloi.
Elsewhere, on the strength of two cracking leading performances - Buckley is very adept in registering subtle emotions and acquits herself beautifully through the woman's perplexing revelations, whereas Plemons is disarming and aw-shucks enough to underline Jake's all-knowing resignation, Kaufman's eclectic cultural references (which are not in Reid's novel) is another boon for sophisticated audience to savor (functioning as fodder to fill the pair's car-driving intervals), although giving a verbatim outpouring of Pauline Kael's scathing review of A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE may stretch too far , this reviewer would rather hear Kaufman's own assessment of Cassavetes' chef d'oeuvre, from which I'M THINKING… is tonally, aesthetically and structurally disparate,but not so much in its perceptive but dispiriting dissection of life's bleakness and futility.
referential entries: Kaufman's SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008, 7.0/10), ANOMALISA (2015, 7.8/10); Michel Gondry's ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004, 8.2/10).
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