I Do Not Understand 'I'm Thinking of Ending Things'

Fifteen minutes into I’m Thinking of Ending Things, I guessed the big twist. I was right. That didn't help. I still have no idea what Charlie Kaufman's newest movie is really about.

 

If you're more lost than I am, I can tell you what's "real" and what's "fantasy". That part is easy. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is not some intricate Mystery Box built to surprise you in a single grand reveal. It isn't Fight Club. The details of the story make no sense right from the start. I could clear up some points, but this review is not one of those "I'm Thinking of Ending Things - Ending Explained!" pieces that are so distressingly popular. No, I'm maybe a few steps ahead of you. But I'm no closer to the answer. What is Kaufman trying to say with this movie? I don't know.

I am not really sure what genre I'm Thinking of Ending Things even belongs in. It definitely is not a love story, because the romance is already terminally ill by the time the movie begins. There's plenty of ridiculous moments, including a broad parody of one of the worst Best Picture winners of the last twenty years. But it isn't a comedy. I was terrified watching much of the film, but horror feels wrong too. If it is a tragedy, it has picked a particularly unsympathetic hero. I'm Thinking of Ending Things is two hours of uncomfortable conversation interrupted by moments of extreme existential nightmares. Then the main narrative dissolves completely. Genre is not a useful tool to help understand this piece.

Never mind my utter bewilderment at I’m Thinking of Ending Things. If you just want a simple yes or no recommendation, then reading stop now. This movie rules. It is an extraordinary piece of art made one of the true greats of cinema. We are spoiled to have Charlie Kaufman. I say we're spoiled, even as he tortures us with his stories about miserable men and the unattainable women around them. I'm Thinking of Ending Things might be his weirdest film yet. Still, while I am so entranced by the filmmaking craft on display here, I don't know much of anything about this purpose of this movie. Does Charlie Kaufman even like the character he's created here? Is this a plea for sympathy for a man ignored by the world? Or is it telling us the character was better off silent because he had nothing to say in the first place?

 

The movie most similar to I’m Thinking of Ending Things in Kaufman’s filmography has to be Synecdoche, New York. One of Things' stars, Jesse Plemmons, even looks just like Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s character Caden Cotard in Synecdoche. They’re both "comedies" in the sense that they’re absurdist narratives full of ridiculous details. Yet that silliness is in service of very serious subject matter. Synecdoche is about the destruction of aging and the meaninglessness of life and the art around it. Caden wants to create great art but can only regurgitate unfinished frustrated stories of his own misery, again and again. All the while, he's getting older, his body is failing him, and his family leaves without warning. This is a Kaufman narrative though, so a musing on the dread of mortality needs a house that’s constantly on fire, a skyscraper-sized theater in the middle of Manhattan, and multiple layers of postmodernist identity confusion. Caden loses everything, never finishes his masterpiece, and discovers no answer. Then he dies.

Fun times, right? Synecdoche, New York might also be one of the greatest movies ever made. If you can, watch it at a plane like I did. Air travel is the most Kaufman-like experience we can have as real people. His movies fit perfectly in the Kafkaesque powerlessness you feel stuck between incomprehensible delays and the ever-watching bored eye of TSA fascism. None of it makes sense, you suffer abuse after abuse, then it all ends.

 

I'm Thinking of Ending Things opens, like Synecdoche, as if it might be a relatively straightforward interpersonal drama. By the twentieth minute in each film, you know you've been fooled. It looked normal enough, but now you're deep in the weeds of the most bizarre filmmaking. Nothing will ever be normal again. There is substantial truth being discussed despite Kaufman's confounding storytelling choices. He's just using strange tools to create those emotions in you.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is set from the perspective of a Girlfriend (Jessie Buckley) to the usual kind of sad, lonely Kaufman protagonist, Jake (Jesse Plemmons). The Girlfriend's inner thoughts are our main narration. Kaufman protagonists typically are self-loathing. But turns out they are even more pitiful if we watch them through the eyes of the women around them. "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" is the Girlfriend's constant thought throughout the film. "Ending things" means ending this relationship. Despite "things" being on borrow-time, the Girlfriend has agreed to have dinner with Jake's parents to be polite. Later she tells us how much easier it is sometimes to just say "yes" instead of facing the confrontation she has been swallowing all movie.

By the way, there is a Janitor (Guy Boyd) at a high school. He is floating somewhere off to the side of the story. He and Jake seem connected somehow. We'll get to that.

 

Jake seems to subconsciously know the more time the Girlfriend has with her thoughts the less time their relationship has left. So, the first forty minutes of the film is Jake’s increasingly desperate attempts to keep up a conversation in a car. It is a disorienting sequence, a solid recreation of being lost in thought and popped back into reality. We learn the Girlfriend is not interested in poetry. But also she is a master poet who can recite a beautiful piece when Jake forces her. It is a long winter drive to the fuck-end of nowhere, which is the farm where Jake's parents live. The Girlfriend insists that she not stay over. She has work tomorrow. Or maybe a paper.

As movies go, an uncomfortable road trip and dinner is not exactly the most epic topic. But even in its relative low-stakes, I'm Thinking of Ending Things can turn that minor social ordeal into intensely gripping filmmaking. These two characters fundamentally do not click. Their conversation is jilted and forced. They are putting in work to keep up this momentum of limping languid conversation. I've had trips like this. They are the kinds of things you don't miss when the world is shut down by quarantine.

Later, when Jake and the Girlfriend are at his parent’s house, it is even worse. Imagine the worst dinner date you've ever had but seemingly never ending. Characters keep forgetting words or dropping malapropisms. There's a lot of forced nervous laughter on both ends. Jake's dad (David Thewlis) cannot understand what the artistic point of a landscape is, forcing the Girlfriend to politely explain why she paints. (Oh she paints now.) Jake's mom (Toni Collette) laughs too loudly, and the Girlfriend picks up that character trait. Jake grows increasingly sullen, angrier all the time that the meal is not going perfectly to whatever vision he had in his head. Every single lull in the conversation might reveal the dark truth: none of these people have anything to say to each other. But you have to keep up the pretense of the party.

 

Kaufman's genius is translating this bit of social awkwardness into outright horror. You would not feel the emotion if he simply filmed an uncomfortable dinner, but you do feel the unnaturalness when the house and all its inhabitants exist in some kind of Lovecraftian Hell.

 

It starts with a few strange details here and there. Jake and the Girlfriend have to wait far too long for the parents to come down the stairs. The basement door is covered in scratches. There's a friendly dog who appears only after Jake remembers he has a dog. It disappears in the next shot. We see the dog’s ashes on a shelf later. Jake parks his car in the middle of an empty field where a drive-way should be. Jake leaves no footprints in the snow. I’m Thinking of Ending Things keeps building more and more broken details. It isn't big showy moments that really scared the shit out of me. It was small things. When Jake and the Girlfriend meet his parents, the shot is lit with a cold blue color temperature. Next shot, it's bright orange, even though we should be in the same house, just a room away. Kaufman is quietly breaking the rules of cinema to unnerve you.

That is when the film's narrative starts to deteriorate. Jake's parents start rapidly aging. His dad now has Alzheimer's and the house is suddenly littered with notes reminding him of things. His mom dies but Jake treats it like she's fine. All the while, the clock is ticking, the snow is falling. Every minute this madness gets worse. The Girlfriend is more and more trapped by Jake's idea of a big happy family in an idyllic farmhouse. Everything is a lie and the lie gets more and more unbelievable the longer we go.

 

In my plot summary I cannot hide the most glaringly obvious missing piece of I'm Thinking of Ending Things. Why doesn’t Jessie Buckley’s character have a name? Well, she is called Lucy at first. But later she’s Louisa, then Lucia, and finally Ames. (She objects to Ames. Her name is definitely not Amy and she wouldn’t go by that nickname.) Lucy is many different things. She's a poet, a painter, a physicist, and more. Maybe she’s a film critic who chain-smokes and talks like Lauren Bacall, who can, from memory, recite a scathing review of the 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence?

The Girlfriend is a better writer than I am. She probably could have finished this review in her first draft. I am now on my fifth. She probably would have cut that aside about air travel many paragraphs back since it contributed nothing. I bet she'd cut this paragraph too. She'd have gotten to the point in under 1,000 words versus the 4,000 or something I will need.

 

The point is, whatever the Girlfriend is, she’s great at it. She’s knowledgeable, funny, attractive, but not intimidating. She’s the kind of pretty you think you can talk to, who wouldn’t laugh at you for trying. She humors Jake and his bullshit. She lets him get his way every time. She's smart but usually not smarter than him. She’s a fantasy figure. She has no name. She has no solid details to her life. Where she ends and Jake begins is increasingly unclear. When did they start dating? How did they meet? That is unclear. They even trade places in a childhood picture.

SPOILERS, if you still don’t get it, but Lucy/Louisa/Lucia/Ames is not real. There was a woman once who almost met a man at a Trivia Night. They never talked. She thought he was a creeper. That is the sum total of their relationship. This Girlfriend we're following is a fantasy the man is having. 

 

Jake is not that man, because he is not real either, or no longer is real. He's an idolized version of a much older man, the Janitor, who has been appearing in the background of the movie the whole time. Maybe the Janitor was Jake decades ago, when he still had promise. He is not Jake anymore. Jake's parents have long ago passed away, just like the dog. Their ages keep shifting because they are jumbled memories of people who once were. Sometimes he remembers them young, sometimes he remembers their death bed.

 

This lovely dinner at Jake's parents house is just some imagined thing that never happened. The Janitor never took his Girlfriend home to show his parents how successful he was. She's brilliant because she must be. The Janitor wants to show how brilliant he is by proxy. Only a brilliant man could win such a smart, talented girl. In reality, he is alone, and always has been. He does not seem all that particularly special to me either.

Is this really so terrible, what the Janitor is doing? Living out a fantasy to quiet down the humiliating giggles of high schoolers watching you perform your menial daily task? Well, I'm Thinking of Ending Things imagines this fantasy relationship as a violation. The Girlfriend never agreed to be part of this loser Janitor’s inner life. Yet here she is, trapped inside this guy’s mind. Her existence begins and ends at her connection with this person who she can barely stand. It certainly says a lot about the psychology of our "hero" that even his own imagined companion is repulsed by him.

We all probably have multiple fantasy lives even as we continue with whatever you want to define as the “real one”. Many people need to Walter Mitty their way through day jobs to stay sane. This author here in his multiverse has written novels, invaded Europe with an army of giant robots, gone to space, overthrown God, and been a great dad to a few imaginary children. As far as I know, none of those things have happened - yet. (I'll get there eventually.) I'll admit too that I have had far more imagined romances than real ones. While I haven't run a poll or anything, I don't think my imaginary people hate me. If the Girlfriend reflects a part of the Janitor, it reflects a deeply unhappy and self-loathing part.

As far as fantasy romances go, the Girlfriend's night with Jake's parents is, on paper at least, not so bad. Men are gross. They can imagine far more disgusting acts than inviting you to the old farm to have Mom's cake. Jake's dinner should be this sweet act of letting the Girlfriend into his life with an open heart. But maybe that makes it perverse too on some level. It isn't intimate, because it isn't true. It is a staged performance played by uncomfortable actors who keep flubbing their lines. That is why this meal becomes such an existential nightmare. If Jake/Janitor just wanted to play out some sex fantasy, it would mean nothing. This dinner should mean everything, yet it is so false as to be hideous.

Jake, for the record, is an awful boyfriend. His insecurity goes from cute and quirky to obnoxious. Maybe you won’t notice how terrible he is by the first date, but you’ll definitely be sick of him by the second or third. He has a lot of baggage and will will push all of it onto you the longer you’re with him. Plus, he's a bad listener, really pretentious, and never leaves you alone for a second to think. Swipe left, ladies.

Throughout all of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, all I wanted was for the Girlfriend to escape. Even as an unreal figment with no permanent reality, she should not be trapped with this Jake guy forever, right? I felt so bad for her, having to suffer with him and his crumbling facade of loving parents. Once she leaves their house, she's still stuck with him, in the passenger seat for more of his complexes and neuroses. She has to watch his feeble meeting with girls at ice cream shops. She shouldn’t be forced to explain to him the problematic parts of the song ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’. She does not need to carry water for decades of failed interactions with the entire female gender. You know by the time Jake drops her off at her house, she will never answer his calls again. But she never gets to ghost him.

I am not sure what kind of reality she might have once she “ends things” but it has to be better than these snowy road trips with a defeated old man in a young man’s body. I'm Thinking of Ending Things would be such an easier movie if it was just the Girlfriend's story. Her choice of unreality versus an eternity inside Jake/Janitor's head could be courageous. You go girl. Put Jake in the bear custom, shove him inside the triangle temple, and watch him burn with a smile on your face. I would completely understand I'm Thinking of Ending Things if it was the Girlfriend's escape from a creeper's mind. But that isn't this movie. I don't know what this movie is instead.

 

In the last half hour, the narrative simply fades to nothingness. Jake disappears from the film, then the Girlfriend disappears next. What at first replaces is them is a pair of interpretive dancers. Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemmons stand aside as two professional dancers play out a romance scene in their costumes, interrupted by a third dancer dressed as the Janitor. I have no idea what this means. The scene these dancers play out is a sweet romance that bares no resemblance to the rotting relationship we've been watching all movie. However, the dancers just wander off anyway. Maybe this has nothing to do with anything.

Whether you understood the big twist or not, by this point in I'm Thinking of Ending Things, you're just as lost as anybody. All those postmodern metaphysics are useless now. I was one step ahead of this movie and by the end, got nowhere closer to the answer.

The Janitor (now again played by Guy Boyd) goes to his car and then seems to die of hypothermia, or maybe a heart attack. “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” does have a second meaning. The Girlfriend thinks it means dissolving her connection with Jake. But it could also be a suicide message. This is the end of the Janitor's unhappy life. I think. A scene later he's walking in the high school naked, following the talking cartoon ghost of a maggoty pig. The nonsense sort of dulls the impact, doesn't it?

The final word of the movie goes to Jake, who has now reappeared on stage at the high school. This is really the point where I am truly lost by this movie. All movie we have seen Jake through the eyes of the Girlfriend and it isn't a pretty picture. Now Kaufman gives Jake the floor. Let us hear his truth.

Except, Jake has no truth. His speech is bullshit. He’s cribbing the entire thing from Ron Howard’s movie, A Beautiful Mind. Jesse Plemmons plays Russell Crowe playing John Nash in a shot-for-shot remake of the ending of the 2002 film.

 

Is Charlie Kaufman poking fun at one of the cheesiest Oscarbait films of the last few decades? I could imagine a person like Jake/Janitor loving maudlin crap like A Beautiful Mind. It is blandly inspirational and wildly inaccurate, celebrating a misunderstood man lost in fantasies. We see earlier the Janitor watching a hilariously bad RomCom about a man’s grand romantic gesture costing a woman her job as a waitress. (That fake-film is inexplicably credited to director Robert Zemeckis when I think Kaufman meant Cameron Crowe?). None of this means anything. Jake is nothing saying anything. Then Jake sings a song from the musical Oklahoma!, which means just as little. His fantasized audience applauds. His imagined Girlfriend watches and cries warmly. End Credits.

I do not know what I am supposed to feel for Jake or Janitor, a creature I’ll call “Jake-itor”. (On second thought, I will never call him "Jake-itor" ever again. Sorry.) Is Kaufman conjuring Pity? Revulsion? Should we even admire him for his escape into fantasy? We see so little of his life. I could not tell you why his ambitions went unfulfilled or why he could not connect to other people. He shows a lot of sympathy towards the outcasts of his high school. But he is not a champion for those ignored by society. Nor is he seething with incel rage.

In the end, I do not think even Jake knows what to say to sum his life. That is why, when give his big moment, Jake cannot talk except in trite references to Hollywood or Broadway. He ultimately seems like a person who just never had that much to say. He worked at being well-read. He learned poetry. He seems to have tried painting at one point. We can see in the basement of the house, that all he can paint is bad copies of existing landscapes. All those various unsuccessful interests Jake pushed into his dream girl, who is at various times an expert at all of them, yet just as unoriginal. 

 

The Janitor was a man with no voice who wanted people to listen to him. His one creation is an imaginary sweetheart, who only tolerates him to be polite.

That’s pretty brutal. As a writer, the idea of person who the world never listened to ultimately having nothing to say anyway is a horrifying idea. Worse is the idea that whatever great truth we think we're saying is just a recycled memory of somebody else's shitty ideas. I'm now in the fourth or fifth revision of this piece, and thinking about this pretentious failure of a man is really getting to me. Am I saying *anything* that matters in these 4,000 or whatever words I'm up to now? Am I actually saying anything at all? When my time is up will Jesse Plemmons stand on my mental stage and only be able to do an impression of President Bill Pullman's speech from Independence Day? Of course, I'm an imposter, I'm reviewing a movie I do not understand. I loved the movie, but even with all these paragraphs am no closer to knowing what about it is good. I've been fighting with this impenetrable mass of a movie for days and the longer I go, the closer I am to just another self-pitying toxic masuclinity Kaufman loser. I'm wrapping this up.

 

I am not certain of this read of the Janitor as a failed artist. Kaufman might be celebrating this Janitor as much as I am repulsed by him. That is the question I cannot answer. Is the Janitor good or bad? Should I pity him or condemn him?

Until I get there, I will never understand I'm Thinking of Ending Things.