I'M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS **1/2
IDEA: On the way to meet her boyfriend's parents in rural Oklahoma, a woman ponders her ambivalent feelings about her relationship.
BLURB: Charlie Kaufman’s self-pitying solipsism is on fully display in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, an invigoratingly surreal, then gratingly banal exercise in meta-textual navel-gazing. Although adapted from another’s work, the film pulses with the festering existential dread and pungent, neurotic middle-aged male misanthropy that is apparently Kaufman’s baseline mode of being. In a fashion similar to the writer’s best past works, however, its morose, blackly absurdist atmosphere keeps the film buzzing for a long while. This is especially true during the early and mid stretches, when Kaufman’s accrual of eerie details - from disorienting camera angles, cuts, and sounds to the increasingly erratic behavior of the characters - effectively lulls the spectator into a place of acute perceptual instability. Subjects blend and blur as chronological time and selfhood become derealized; projections and memories yoke together in one insoluble movement of consciousness, where anxieties, regrets, and nostalgias run amok in an echo chamber of rumination. If Kaufman had been able to sustain and deepen this braid of funny, disquieting metaphysical inquiry, I’m Thinking of Ending Things might have more heft. But, and perhaps it’s more the fault of the source material than anything, the film rather abruptly fizzles in its final quarter. What was evocatively enigmatic is hollowed out by trite nihilism; worse, the integrity of our name-shifting protagonist, played with such palpable, soul-whimpering melancholy by Jessie Buckley, is betrayed by a perspectival bait-and-switch as lazy as it is narratively nonsensical. What can be said, at least, is that Kaufman intimately knows the inside of an overworking, self-tortured psyche, and he’s honest about what it looks and feels like to not really know a way out.
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