jessie buckley im thinking of ending things

#Jessie buckley im thinking of ending things cracked
#Jessie buckley im thinking of ending things movie

But he seems trapped in the blinkered point-of-view of a socially arrested high-school loser. Kaufman seems to be saying that love is an illusion and that people, if they’re true to who they are, have no possibility of connecting.

#Jessie buckley im thinking of ending things movie

But “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” suggests a joyless couple out of a mediocre Woody Allen film crossed with “Barton Fink.” It’s not just a quirky, morose downer of a movie - it’s didactically morose. Going into a new Charlie Kaufman film, our own hopes as moviegoers are always raised, because at his best he’s a wizard of the imagination, and a uniquely grounded anti-romantic romantic. That’s because Kaufman is now treating hopelessness as the ultimate signifier of integrity. There isn’t a spark of faith or good feeling in sight. But in the place where Kaufman is now working from, he has so dichotomized that conflict - between the fake and the real, between bogus Hollywood uplift and the terrible “truth” of what life is - that he’s presenting the audience with a film that’s an homage to hopelessness. Okay, fine that’s what any adventurous filmmaker does. And what Charlie Kaufman reveals in that line is that he sees himself engaged in a war against fake, crappy movie ideas, a war that he’s fighting with real ideas. They might talk about movies, but not about “movie ideas,” and certainly not about crappy movie ideas replacing real ideas that’s the way a screenwriter thinks. That line is a tell, because no ordinary person would say it. “Like, they grow in your brain, replacing real ideas. “Even fake, crappy movie ideas want to live,” she says. Buckley’s character, having acknowledged her attraction to ending things, tells Jake that she actually thinks everything on earth wants to live. But then comes one of those lines of dialogue that reveals, almost inadvertently, where a filmmaker is coming from. And a movie about them is destined to be a kind of death dance, too. What they have isn’t a relationship - it’s a slow-motion death dance.

Listening to these two, we can see what the problem is: They’re depressives who don’t spark each other. When Buckley tells us that she can’t imagine the relationship lasting, we nod our heads, thinking: It’s hard to see, actually, how it ever lasted past one or two blah dates. At his behest, the two discuss Wordsworth, Mussolini, the musical “Oklahoma!” and suicide bombers, but mostly they seem to be acting out their mutual sense of muffled despair.

#Jessie buckley im thinking of ending things cracked

But Jake, who sounds like he’s never cracked a joke in his life, is a painfully staid and passive fellow with a dry, droning voice and a way of showing off his arcane knowledge of things that can bring any conversation to a standstill. Buckley’s young woman is no happy camper, but with her fast-break grin, her blithe putdowns, and her aureole of reddish curls, she has a cynical urban vivacity. Should she be ending that?ĭuring the car ride, we see why that question might be hanging in the balance.

But the words also apply to the relationship she’s in. The first words we hear, in voiceover, are Buckley confessing “I’m thinking of ending things,” and she then describes what could be a suicidal tendency. “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” the new movie written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, opens with an extended road-trip sequence in which a young woman ( Jessie Buckley) - she’s identified in the credits simply as the Young Woman - drives through a country snowstorm with Jake ( Jesse Plemons), her boyfriend of six weeks, to meet his parents at their Oklahoma farmhouse.