Criminally underrated, the movie now feels eerily in tune with our tilted, construct-your-own-bubble world. 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. 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. 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. 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.Ī 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. 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. But the scare quotes are earned, as is the overall instability - of our narrator’s reliability, of what we’re watching, of reality itself. Make that “adaptation,” and yes, we’re aware of the irony in referencing that particular word in the context of this filmmaker. “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. “It’s why I like road trips,” a driver says to his his companion as they hustle down an icy highway.
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