I'm Thinking of Ending Things

 

Writer / director Charlie Kaufman's surrealism is more provocative, potent, and, at times, ponderous than that of more prolific and nimble eccentrics like Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson.

Kaufman's movies -- Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, among them -- are punchy contemplations of the struggle to be fully whomever it is we are and how that struggle is complicated by other people.

Kaufman's characters -- I suspect to one degree or another alters to his ego -- wrestle with ideas, not all of them original notions, that frequently are left unresolved but nonetheless thoroughly examined -- thus the sometimes ponderous nature of his work.

"I'm Thinking of Ending Things" is not as one might suspect about suicide, necessarily. It is ostensibly a two-character consideration of ambivalence. A young woman played by Jessie Buckley and her boyfriend, Jake, played by a never-better Jesse Plemons, are on the road in Oklahoma during a snow storm to visit Jake's parents, played by David Thewlis and Toni Collette, at their farmhouse.

During the home visit, the four characters seem to shift in time and space, with the parents appearing at different ages and in different stages of infirmity. The young woman, the dominant POV, falls into playing whatever role the situation demands even though she doesn't want to be there, with her boyfriend and having to contend with his or his parents' issues. The young couple's erudition belies their surroundings and circumstances; they are extraordinarily insightful and articulate but also guarded and uncertain.

Interspersed with the home visit are scenes of a high school janitor (Guy Boyd) cleaning the hallways while a production of Oklahoma is being rehearsed. The final reel of the movie brings these elements together but the getting there is a bit of a slog, and the ambiguity of the movie's ending will no doubt spark all manner of speculation among those who were arrested by Kaufman's idiosyncratic vision.