Apologies to clever titles like Anomalisa and Synecdoche, New York, but Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would be a better fit for most of Charlie Kaufman’s movies. It’s already taken by his greatest addition to the canon, but the title—borrowed from a poem about a fraught romance—so succinctly sums up the Kaufman disposition that it could designate his whole oeuvre. The spots on Kaufman’s mind are symptoms of the human condition, the sickness unto death, that dizzying awareness of our own consciousness and the paradox between its possibilities and limits. To remove these spots would be to cast off one’s humanity, an impossible respite that both tantalizes and terrifies Kaufman. His films live in that space: in the mind that dies by living but does not want to die. Perhaps I’m Thinking of Ending Things is also a fitting title for his body of work.
The mortal connotations are applicable, but in the immediate sense of the film’s narrative, the title of Kaufman’s latest refers to a relationship on the rocks. Maybe not “on the rocks”, actually—that idiom is too grounded for a Kaufman trip—”up in the air” is more like it. It’s a relationship suspended in purgatory, neither growing nor failing, moving only laterally in the form of a road trip to meet the parents. The man behind the wheel is Jake (Jesse Plemons), a seemingly well-meaning boyfriend who oft looks a little distracted; his girlfriend in the passenger seat is, according to the movie’s promotional material, only known as The Young Woman (Jessie Buckley). She’s our protagonist, on the ultimate hero’s journey of meeting her future in-laws. But she’s thinking of ending things.
We spend the better part of the film listening to her thoughts, so we know that she’s contemplating a breakup before she even gets in the car. But as the couple interacts on the drive, you’d hardly know the two were dating. Jesse and Jessie tune their characters’ body language to discordant wavelengths: Plemons tightens up and grips the wheel as if letting go would sidle him closer to an unwanted body in the passenger seat; Buckley squirms around so much you’d think she’d slide out the door were it to open. They talk, but the dialogue inside The Young Woman’s head is more prolific, and more honest. The topics of her conversation with Jake are scattershot—what’s on the radio, deadlines coming up. Jake says he likes road trips because “it’s good to remind yourself the world’s larger than the inside of your own head”. He seems wrong for some reason.
Maybe because his words are at odds with what we’re seeing. This world’s not large at all: the framing is all claustrophobic interiors, suggesting that Kaufman recruited Cold War cinematographer Łukasz Żal for his experience with smothering open space; the screen itself is cramped into the square confines of the 4:3 Academy ratio; editor Robert Frazen cycles between angles that stress just how nowhere there is to go. When Jake and The Young Woman arrive at Jake’s parents’ house, the larger setting offers no relief. Time breaks down, characters age forwards and backwards between shots, the layout of the house morphs and swivels—and Toni Colette, continuing her cinematic residency as a deranged mother, behaves as if she lost her mind in this brick-and-mortar black hole. None of it makes sense unless the world isn’t larger than the inside of your own head. The topography of the film is tied to The Young Woman’s mental spiral. Is this warped reality the nightmare she imagines building with Jake? Does a part of her brain fear gaining new parents because them too she will see wither and die?
The perpetual conversation of Kaufman’s screenplay points the viewer in such directions. The long, drawn-out scenes of I’m Thinking of Ending Things are full of internal and external monologuing, often with a nakedly didactic bent. Through his small cast of characters, Kaufman quotes existentialist thinkers, laments the plague of finitude on human consciousness, and pokes fun at the assumed obscurity of abstract art, among other things. He also discusses how our “selves” are composites of the media we consume. That notion seems particularly disturbing to the characters and, tangibly, to Kaufman: if the things we watch and read are just as much a part of us as the choices we make, are we really free actors, or are the ghosts of stories whispering in our ears? If the latter, then the worlds inside our own heads—projected onto reality as the only world we know—are plagiarized. If individual reality is an extension of the self and the self doesn’t even belong to oneself, our finite experience starts to look like the distorted architecture of the film.
The fact that I’m Thinking of Ending Things acknowledges itself as part of this process is only the tip of the iceberg. Normally, didacticism and exposition of a film’s themes aren’t seen as positives—the classic rule is “show, don’t tell”—but Kaufman makes the telling work by keeping self-reflexivity a constant undercurrent. His tactics ingeniously field criticisms of this method: just when I started to think that the film was leaning too far into piecemeal observations from Kaufman, The Young Woman procures a cigarette from nowhere and begins quoting Pauline Kael’s review of A Woman Under the Influence, vicariously addressing my complaint and shedding light on Kaufman’s rationale for all the telling. The fact that she’s quoting a movie review isn’t even addressed, and neither is Pauline Kael, barring her appearance on a bookshelf in an earlier scene.
What Kaufman does with the fourth wall here is grippingly avant-garde. He doesn’t break it down or leave it standing—he renders it translucent. It’s in the way, but it’s inviting. The film vocally dares you to find meaning in certain symbols, fixing your gaze past the wall, and then traps you in the dread and detachment swirling on the other side. Kaufman and his team of consummate artists, both behind and in front of the camera, have built an art museum out of I’m Thinking of Ending Things: aesthetically arranged to generate anxiety as you walk through, and doing so with such power that stopping to read the loquacious placards doesn’t interrupt the experience. It’s like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind without the sci-fi conceit and in a minor key—the inescapability of our little worlds is a far worse threat to your partner than wiping them from your memory.
★★★★★ (5/5)
