Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Charlie Kaufman has, I suppose, long been the mass-market acceptable face of art-house nonsense, at least up until the confounding Synecdoche, New York cratered at the box-office, perhaps proving a touch beyond the upper limits of most people’s tolerance for art-house nonsense. Hell, as a more-often-than-not lover of art-house nonsense, it was beyond my tolerance. I’m sad to say that this was also very much the case for his latest, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which will perhaps colour the lack of effort I’ll be putting into this review.
This is framed around a trip by a variably named young woman, played by Jessie Buckley, and her boyfriend, Jesse Plemons’s Jake, taking a car trip to meet Jesse’s parents, played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis. The drive is beset with some relatively meaningful conversations interspersed with the young woman’s occasional drifts into reverie, which from my addled memory perhaps sets up the themes that I think Kaufman hopes to explore in the next section, but I think I may be a little to kind to it here.
Said next section, the awkward visit to Jake’s parent’s farm, jumps around so much in time, character history and narrative that there’s really no point in me trying to explain any of it, and as far as I’m concerned, attempting to divine any meaning from. It’s very much Synecdoche, New York levels of confounding art-house nonsense, and I am very much not here for it.
Perhaps a little too close minded, and I can see if you’re looking at this more as a text to read and interpret you may get a good deal more out of this. Personally I think it’s asking a little too much of the audience to reconstruct quite so much of the meaning of, well, everything in the film, and I found myself entirely checked out by the ending of things.
There’s clearly lots of good work going on here, from the committed performances of the cast and all of the technical details, and the arbitrary dance number, but it’s all in service of something that’s, if not entirely impenetrable, at least more effort than I consider it is worth to penetrate. Oo-er, missus.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is not, I suppose, in the technical sense of things, “A Bad Film”. It is, however, a film I roundly hated, and hope to never think of again. So, strong nonrecommend.