Movie Review - I am Thinking of Ending Things (2020) by Charlie Kaufman
I have been obsessed with the recent Charlie Kaufman film, I am Thinking of Ending Things ever since I saw it last week, trying to dissect what it all meant. Having seen the film two times and reading the book it is based on, I think I can now provide my two cents on how I feel about this film.
I am thinking of Ending Things is a film about an old man regretting how his life turned out to be and if things would have been different had he made some certain choices. However, this is not what the film on the surface looks about at all, the film is beautifully disguised as the story of this “young woman” battling the idea of ending the relationship with her boyfriend Jake while on a trip visiting his parents for the first time. What makes it even more special is that there is no final reveal moment where film tells you explicitly about what it is about, Kaufman respects his audience and gives them all the pieces of the puzzle to figure this by themselves. All of the conversations in the film reveal in one way or another an aspect of the psychology of this individual even if on the surface it seems like just two people having a normal conversation. Similar to his previous films, especially Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman is once again interested in exploring the fragility of the human memory, how when we recall or imagine something it is not like a video recording, but these blurred fragments that may or may not make sense when pieced together. Both the writing in the film and the way the camera moves helps convey this idea to a great degree. We will see the camera reach the location before our characters themselves arrive there, mimicking how when we often jump to what happens next while remembering something since we already know what happened. Jake’s parents in the film appear to be of different ages throughout the visit, overlaying the idea that we do not recall someone we have known our whole life as fixed points in time but an amalgamation of what they were like at the various moments in our lives.
While the book is great in its own regards, Kaufman has really elevated the source material by not only doing justice to themes and ideas of the source material but developing them even further. The book’s thesis primarily revolves around the objectiveness of thought. How our actions or the things that we say can be faked but our thoughts are closer to the truth and are more representative of our true selves. However, the film offers a critique of this idea by going one step further to say that even our thoughts are influenced by other people’s opinions or by the media that we consume, denying any their objectivity. Nowhere this is more evident than towards the end of the film where the old man imagines having succeeded in his endeavors and giving an award-winning speech which is almost verbatim of the ending speech in A Beautiful Mind. I find it fascinating how much this film has to say without saying anything, exemplifying the book’s take on the role of semiotics and metaphors in our understanding of the world.
With I am thinking of ending things, Charlie Kaufman has another masterpiece under his belt and it really goes to say why he is one of the best filmmakers working today. This is indeed his most inaccessible film and frustratingly hard to recommend, but if you are willing to absorb everything it has to say it reveals itself as one of his most rewarding films. 10/10
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