‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’ Review: Charlie Kaufman’s Trouble in Mind

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

“It’s why I like road trips,” a driver says to his his companion as they hustle down an icy highway. “It’s good to remind yourself that the world’s larger than the inside of your own head.” The exchange — though it’s tough to call it an exchange, given that it feels like the man behind the wheel is mumbling the thought aloud to himself — happens early in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of Iain Reid’s novel, and feels like one of many breadcrumbs being dropped for viewers. Make that “adaptation,” and yes, we’re aware of the irony in referencing that particular word in the context of this filmmaker. But the scare quotes are earned, as is the overall instability — of our narrator’s reliability, of what we’re watching, of reality itself. It uses the book’s already complicated storyline of “boy meets girl, boy takes girl to meet parents, things fall apart and the center cannot hold” to delve into deeper thoughts on memory, misery and mortality. And somehow, amidst all of the shifting perspectives and timeframes and overall blurring of lines, it also manages to move you to tears even as it leaves you bewildered and unmoored.

A veteran of TV writers’ rooms, Kaufman established himself as a name-brand screenwriter with Being John Malkovich (1999), followed by a series of scripts over the proceeding decade that turned potentially absurd scenarios into existential, oddly emotional comedies. He had the right voice for a woozy and wobbly early-21st-century zeitgeist, he had the right directors (Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry) spiking his cerebral concepts with gonzo whimsy, and by 2005, he had an Oscar. When we got the pure, uncut Kaufman with his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York (2008), you could see the darker absurdities of his work inching toward a genuine bleakness. An artist constructs a work that mimics real life and then goes so far down the creative rabbit hole that the work replaces real life — it’s as meta as it is metaphorical. Criminally underrated, the movie now feels eerily in tune with our tilted, construct-your-own-bubble world. What followed for Kaufman was, beside co-directing the brilliant stop-motion-animated Anamolisa (2015) were years of stalled projects and false starts.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things not only nudges Kaufman back in to the spotlight, it also reminds you of how much that voice has been missed. And though the film does indeed begin with a road trip, it feels very much a product of living in a world both inside and outside one’s head. Waiting to be picked up by her new beau, a young woman (Jessie Buckley) — her name might be Lucy, or Louisa, or none of the above; again, it’s complicated — contemplates cutting things off. She’s a student, majoring in quantum physics … or perhaps painting, or film theory. The guy, Jake (Jesse Plemons), seems nice enough. They met at a local bar during a trivia night, or possibly she was a waitress who served him. Either way, after a few months (or maybe it’s just been a few weeks?), the relationship seems to have run its course for her. Still, they’re planning on venturing out to his folks’ house out in rural Oklahoma, and away they go.

As with Reid’s book, the first act is more or less a philosophical back-and-forth that takes up 22 minutes of screen time. They talk of Wordsworth and long-titled poems (“you really get your words’ worth with him”), playground sets in front of abandoned houses, musical theater, movies, Mussolini, the all-purpose use of the exclamation “wow,” the weather. He shows off about how much he knows in regards to the subject of her upcoming thesis paper. She reluctantly agrees to recite something she wrote, which turns out to be a melancholy ode that happens to perfectly capture Jake’s mindset.