SPOILER ZONE

I wish this could have just been a weird poem movie. GOD I wish this could have just been a weird poem movie. I was so down for this as a loopy, uncomfortable, open-ended horror film loosely about the idea that you can never go home again, and also you should break up with your boyfriend. Just a disjointed nap nightmare you have on your parent’s couch on Thanksgiving weekend. That would have been cool with me! Love when things make me say “What!” out loud twenty times in an hour, not wanting an answer!

But no, I’m Thinking Of Ending Things had to go and answer. Based on a 2016 novel, I have since learned, this movie turns out to have something between a twist and a thesis, and more annoying than either: the eventually unavoidable fact that despite being our protagonist, Jessie Buckley is just a figment of Jesse Plemons’s imagination, and it was all about the neuroses of one sad, bad man all along. To his credit Charlie Kaufman doesn’t present this as a ‘gotcha’ surprise, mostly because it’s not really presented at all. For me I just got to a point, probably somewhere in hour two, where I just had to accept that there was just no other conclusion I was going to be able to come to. That this whole movie we had been driving down a snowbound one-lane road in the dark, and the turnoffs I was still looking for were never going to come.

I think mostly I found the imaginary girlfriend more artistically frustrating than necessarily misogynistic. Because she is at least intended to be the anti-manic pixie dream girl, rather in the mode of Kate Winslet’s character in Kaufman’s earlier Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. She spends a lot of time mulling in voice-over about how she’s not really getting anything out of this relationship and how, say, she feels like her role in it is to just prop up a man through letting him be associated with her own accomplishments through the mere fact of dating her. Well-observed, although defining herself only as Not His Manic Pixie Dream Girl is still a definition rooted in him not her, which of course is functionally the only option here as she straight up does not have an existence outside of him, which is admittedly pretty much peak misogyny, so!

But even if we can set that aspect aside, it’s still artistically frustrating too. Because she’s definitely the main character here, it’s her point-of-view and narration that we receive, the film has absolutely been about her. And so that makes the ending confusing, and I don’t mean because of the Oklahoma! performance—it’s emotionally confusing to have to spend the last 15 minutes recalibrating to prioritizing this guy and his feelings instead. For instance, now that we have to accept that he has just dreamt her up, then are we supposed to retroactively feel respect and sympathy for his self-awareness that he could so accurately imagine these previous two hours’ worth of damning indictments of his own shitty attitudes? All my whats shifted to much less enjoyable whys; ironically, the less inconclusive it got the more I wondered what was the point of all this.

Everyone gets to Act in this, capital A, so there’s that at least. Unfortunately this ultimately frustrated me too though, because the reason why they all get to Act is because they’re all playing flights of fancy, even this Jesse Plemons is just an imagined form of the older one—Jake, he at least does have a name I can use—and because the whole thing is a warped daydream of continually changing scenarios where no one’s really real, there’s little consistency in any of the characters. They’re by nature mercurial and unpredictable and actors seem to enjoy being able to play in this way, but I don’t know, watching things that heavily feature these kinds of roles has become more and more taxing to me in recent years. I don’t particularly care about a character’s big emotions if I have no understanding of how they got there due to the inconstancy of their internal landscape, because the work would rather keep surprising you with a character’s behavior than let you develop empathy for them. And the reason why I find I’m Thinking of Ending Things uniquely frustrating in this regard, is that Jessie Buckley (smartly) plays her role like maybe she would want to be someone we could get to know, but is prevented from it by the fact that she’s been imagined by this guy who keeps rebooting her demeanor and interests like he’s trying on different shirts.

Anyway. The things I most enjoyed were all the parts that were the most stylized and (therefore?) most free of the baggage of trying to be about something, my highlights of those portions being:
– dream ballet obvi
– the fake film within the film being directed by ROBERT ZEMECKIS—surreal, mystifyingly mean, surreal again, and by that point I’d rapid-cycled into hysterics

★★