Im thinking of ending things jesse8/17/2023 But then what to make of the elderly janitor, played by Guy Boyd, whose slow rounds at a high school punctuate the main story even as his connection to it remains unclear? Jake’s stolid substance never seems in doubt. Early on, the camera lingers on a smudge of toothpaste at the corner of Jake’s mouth until he self-consciously wipes it away. Yet if she is a fantasy, she’s an impressively perverse one - a fantasy who has control of the film’s perspective and who surveys her presumed creator with the waning enthusiasm of someone trying to convince themselves they’re not actually repelled by the person they’re with. But the film becomes spongier and stranger as it goes along, and as the Young Woman’s edges get fuzzier, her backstory blurs into Jake’s. It starts off rooted in the grinding mundanity of winter-gray roadsides as the Young Woman drives with Jake to meet his parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) for the first time, though she’s already considering breaking off their six- or seven-week relationship. Kaufman is an often brilliant, sometimes exasperating filmmaker with unstoppable compulsions toward metafiction, and I’m Thinking of Ending Things is no different in that regard. and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, director of Synecdoche, New York and Anomalisa. And other details give us cause to wonder how real the Young Woman is meant to be - chief among them that she’s a character in a movie from Charlie Kaufman, writer of Adaptation. She’s smart, is the point, smart about the things her boyfriend, Jake (Jesse Plemons), also happens to feel smart about himself - the contents of the bookcase in his childhood bedroom line up perfectly with everything the two talk about. The Young Woman is studying virology or gerontology or cinema, or actually she’s a poet or a painter. Her clothes morph too, coat and sweater changing colors from shot to shot, a pearl necklace appearing and then vanishing. She’s Lucy, Louisa, Lucia, and, at one point, Ames ( Short for Amy? she wonders in voice-over). The young woman played by Jessie Buckley in I’m Thinking of Ending Things is credited only as that - the Young Woman - though she’s referred to by a series of names that shift with the film’s unsteady reality. Charlie Kaufman’s new Netflix movie is wry, surreal, and an artistic dead end.
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