Watching a Charlie Kaufman film can be akin to reeling under a maelstrom of ideas, theories, cross-references and visual sleights-of-hand. ...
Watching a Charlie Kaufman film can be akin to reeling under a maelstrom of ideas, theories, cross-references and visual sleights-of-hand. Beyond two-thirds of the running time of any film written or directed by Kaufman, his over-layered narratives toss the viewer around, no matter how much of a sucker that viewer is for his basic genius to dare the never-seen-before and persistence to pick wounds deep inside of his characters or to lay bare layers of what his new film’s male protagonist describes as “black auras, millstones and oozing wounds”.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which Kaufman has written and directed, demands more than patience. I watched the 124-minute film, which is being streamed on Netflix, with three breaks, but that proved challenging because I tended to miss little details that have minor, subtle but illuminating pay-offs later. So over five hours, I rewound, replayed and managed a laboured but ultimately inspiring watch. If anything, Kaufman is a creative visionary, and it’s hard not to marvel at that.
The film has two parallel journeys, and both journeys involve a “Young Woman” who has various names (Jessie Buckley), and Jake (Jesse Plemons), a fragile, imploding, intellectually rigorous and truthful teacher. They are a couple who lives...
