The couple debate Tolstoy’s phrase about happy families being alike when the woman declares, to Jake’s parents, that she’s a painter, a discussion about abstraction, realism, characters, and landscapes ensues, followed by her discovery that her paintings are really those of the real-life artist Ralph Albert Blakelock, posters of whose work are found in Jake’s basement. His relationship to the story eventually becomes clear (even dominant) while he himself remains obscure, the most salient aspect of his personality and experience is delivered in a near-flash frame shortly before the movie’s end. He heads to work in an isolated rural school and undertakes his janitorial rounds in its long, empty corridors, doing little else. There’s also another character, one who crops up in brief scenes and quick flashes, an elderly and solitary school janitor (Guy Boyd), the very mention of whom seems spoiler-y, even though he shows up early in the film. (The young woman eventually tries to explain the shifts as her sense of seeing the effects of time.) His mother is active, debilitated, sardonic and youthful, elderly and moribund. His father is hale his father is afflicted with dementia (giving rise to a touching set of expedients-labels with the names of objects affixed to them) his father is younger and dark-haired, older and white-haired, with or without a bandage on his forehead. In conversations with Jake’s parents around the dinner table and in the living room, the woman’s identity morphs-at different times, her different jobs are mentioned, along with her different names-and his parents’ identities shift, too. D., whose book, “ Rotten Perfect Mouth,” the character later finds on Jake’s childhood bookshelf she opens it and finds the poem she recited earlier. It turns out to be a poem by the real-life poet Eva H. He puts on the radio they get a song from “Oklahoma!” (This musical, which is planted like Chekhov’s gun in the film’s first act, goes wildly off in its last one.) Jake prompts her to recite one of her poems, and she does. Her cell phone rings the caller is someone named Lucy. Meanwhile, Jake seems to be hearing-and responding to-her thoughts, as when she thinks a slight variant on the line “ The Child is father of the Man,” and Jake instantly speaks to her of Wordsworth. (The movie makes much of the convention of voice-overs being used to express characters’ thoughts.) En route, she continues her rueful musings about the relationship, in the interstices of the couple’s jibing, high-flown conversation. Not far into the trip, strange things start happening: once more, the woman thinks, I’m thinking of ending things, and Jake hears her, or thinks he does. (It brings to mind a quote from the Kael review, in which she takes Cassavetes to task for his film’s “idiot symbolism.”) Jake reassures her: he has chains, as if such a heavy metaphor were needed. On a cold winter day, the couple are taking a road trip to a remote farmhouse where Jake’s parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) live she’ll be meeting them for the first time, but there’s added pressure built in, because a blizzard is rising, and she has to get back home that very night because of work obligations (which vary with her stated job). She goes on to voice, inside her head, her misgivings about the relationship while waiting for Jake to drive up. (There’s an awful lot of seeming in the movie, a slipperiness that is itself a hedge against the movie’s being taken to be anything in particular.) The first line of the film is its title, spoken by the woman, in voice-over. Kaufman’s film (which he wrote and directed, based on a novel by Iain Reid) is the story of a young woman (Jessie Buckley) whose name may be Lucy, Lucia, or Louisa, and who may be a scientist, a poet, an artist, a waitress, or some combination thereof she’s dubiously in a relationship with Jake (Jesse Plemons), who seems to be a teacher, or, at least, to work in a school. Like “A Woman Under the Influence,” “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is a story of a couple in crisis. (Kaufman seems obsessed with film critics these days: his recent novel, “ Antkind,” which Jon Baskin reviewed for The New Yorker, has one as its protagonist.) It’s a good trick, albeit a dangerous one: though few critics (certainly not this one) would liken themselves to Kael, they’d nonetheless be tempted to compare Kaufman’s film to Cassavetes’s. Charlie Kaufman, in his new film, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” (which opens Friday, on Netflix), takes out a cinematic insurance policy against negative reviews by means of a scene in which a character cites an infamous real-life pan of a classic film-Pauline Kael’s negative review, in The New Yorker, in 1974, of John Cassavetes’s “A Woman Under the Influence”-and another character rebuts the review by pointing out the “sympathy” that the movie evokes.
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