‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’: is it a dreary relationship or the rhythmic life you are tired of? Nothing matters when you go into a constant loop of contemplation. Jessie Buckley whose name and characteristics aren’t steady throughout the movie is meeting her boyfriend’s parents but that somehow makes you uncomfortable for many reasons.
[SPOILERS INCLUDED]
This Netflix film will not let you have an iota of satisfaction but pushes you into a loop of confusion. Not confused by the authenticity of the central character portrayed by Jessie but the film treats other characters like sand sculptures constantly re-shaping their traits and actions. It seems like every character around Jessie is stuck like a broken disc, or are just ghosts. You as a viewer will have mixed feelings about it.
Trust me, any Charlie Kaufman’s movie needs more than basic cinematic knowledge, twice the watching, and contemplating on how he connects two parallel realms – fiction and reality. This film, based on a novel by Iain Reid seems oblique, like the screenplays such as Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York.
Jake, young woman and janitor
Nothing comes to you directly, everything seems like the film is beating around the bush, but with promising certainty to it. So I tried to decipher the meaning behind, ‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’.
We hear the story through Jessie Buckley whose name isn’t disclosed throughout the movie because, spoiler alert, she doesn’t exist. This is the big truth the movie telecasts. But who is this woman? Before we decode this, her boyfriend Jake appears to be a calm individual, smart and the kind who makes his parents proud. But in multiple instances into the movie, we notice that Jake is this young woman and the young woman is his imagination of how his girlfriend would be.
Lucy, Louisa, Lucia etc her name is never fixed and her clothes change as they step into the dining room, living room or Jake’s childhood bedroom. Even the story of how they met one another seems dizzy and convoluted. Her eerie, high-pitched laugh while narrating their origin story echoes as she mentions that she found Jake to be an attractive guy who was with his quiz team, ‘Brezhnev’s Eyebrows’. Jake cuts her off to correct how she says, ‘Brezhnev’, making it seem like Jake wants to be the ‘smart-one’, he wants his girl to be smart but not more than him.
Her profession constantly changes every shot. She comes across as an artist and we learn that Jake’s basement is filled with the same art she shows Jake’s parents. She suddenly becomes a poet but the poem she quotes is just a piece from a book in Jake’s room, and she also steps into the shoes of a film critic, we notice Jake to be a major film-geek and in love with Pauline Kael’s work and even embodies Kael.
While so many plots unravel, we see an old janitor cleaning the walls of a high school and kids imitating how sloth-y his walk is. Totally irrelevant… in terms of timing but crucial to the plot.
What started off as a means of a young woman ending her relationship with her other half turns into an Escher staircase of a story-line. Suddenly, the janitor appears to be enjoying his meal in a classroom while watching a movie and the narrator is now a waitress, while Jake becomes the customer. A film-within-a-film. And the movie transposed back to Jake’s farm house, the narrator for a moment switches from Jessie Buckley to Colby Minifie who plays the waitress within the movie.
There is a moment in the film when Jake’s mother asks Jessie Buckley’s character to go to the basement to do the laundry and we see a bunch of janitor uniforms swirling in the washing machine. This is the point in the movie that triggers few hints whether Jake is the janitor.
What really caught my attention in this movie is the representation of the circle of life. Though Jake envisages this version of his girlfriend, there is a course of how he tunes out scenarios of his mother and father having health problems in their old age, them quarreling over matters while they were young, seeing his mother hospitalized. It all looks like years have passed inside the farm house. All whilst he was imagining his feminist girlfriend with him.
The movie also makes it abundantly clear that though he likes Pauline Kael, that version of his girlfriend intimidates him. They have moments of conflict which looks like their relationship is finally going to end but their persona shifts constantly. All this occurs overnight. Or maybe they are stuck in a time loop? It is for you to interpret.
Jake and the janitor
Jake and his ‘imaginary’ girlfriend leave the farmhouse and are on the road that looks dangerous with snow soaking up the roads. He craves the Tulsey town ice-cream and specifically insists on getting there. Though he claims to love sugar, he doesn’t eat at all and when he reaches the ice-cream store- he sees women and looks away. They resemble the girls who made fun of his lousy walk in the school halls. Drawing references to how bleak his childhood was.
But all is not well when Jake wishes to discard the ice-cream while his girlfriend wishes to just get home, he asks; ‘The farm-house?’ Almost as though he never wants to leave his comfort zone or in this case, the janitor never leaving the high school.
Though the movie starts off with the audience’s thoughts that the lady wishes to ‘end things’ in terms of her relationship, the movie weaves into the notion that Jake who supposedly is the janitor wishes to end his life. Even while the janitor is cleaning the halls, it is inter-cut with musicals and dance performances by students and only during the climax we truly understand what it represents.
Remember the ice-cream from Tulsy Town? Well, Jake plans to throw it in the high school bin but feels like someone is creepily watching him and his girlfriend. In an angry attempt to confront, he leaves his imaginary girlfriend in the car and is long gone. This is the moment, the narrator a.k.a ‘the imaginary girlfriend’ visits the insides of the school to meet the janitor himself.
Here we see the narrator and janitor strike a conversation where she describes that she is looking for her boyfriend. A few moments later, she completely changes the story and talks about how she was in a bar with her girlfriend and Jake was the creepy man looking at them, she feels unsafe and is tormented by men who don’t let women be. She again claims to have a boyfriend because only then other men would give up on staring at women.
This movie has elegance while addressing issues like labeling an individual to be autistic or homosexual. Tarnished for being gay or a woman, today’s version of the world where each one of us are enclosed with so much hatred against one another that peaceful co-existence is soon-to-be-a myth.
The Climax – Jake’s awful life
Those wonderful moments of dance performances in the school hallway is nothing other than an idealised version of Jake and the narrator. This short musical is played out in a manner to depict how Jake idealised his life – romance, money, joy, an extravagant proposal and a happily ever after. Only to be interrupted by a fictionalised character, the janitor who joins the dance and kills the idealised Jake, destroying everything he truly wanted. The performance is beautiful and artistic, yet filled with self-loathing and inherent pity. The real, older Jake a.k.a the janitor has destructed his ideal life and let go off the fantasy girl – the narrator.
We see the final moments of Jake sobbing outside the school in his Ute as he sees an imaginary pig. A story he narrated to the narrator when they were in the farm house about how his father had forgotten about the pigs and they were devoured from the inside by maggots. It draws a direct contrast to how depression is eating him alive from inside. He follows the pig, naked to symbolise how death sees no personality, it allows you nothing but your body and soul.
But wait? Jake does not let himself die before imagining the perfect farewell. He is seen on a stage with people looking like ghosts sitting in the audience, along with the narrator, father and mother, he is delivering a speech for a lifetime achievement. He’s against a set-up from the musical Oklahoma!, which Jake truly cherishes and his final hoorah song is ‘Lonely Room’. The Oklahoma! outside character, Jud, who is a creepy bloke who tried to win over the female lead, Laurey, attempts to kill her beau before falling on his own knife and ending his life, accidentally.
And the movie concludes on this note. A sense of discomfort and lament that sticks with you for eternity.
For me, it felt like the epitome of film making and screenplay, for Charlie Kaufman, it was what he could direct with grace.
“I read it and I really liked the dreaminess of it and the dream logic and the irrationality of it. And I found that very compelling. Then it was the fact that it was very small, that it was contained, that it was four characters and three locations, it seemed like something I might be able to get financing for. I’ve been struggling to get stuff made and this seemed like a possibility. So that’s what attracted me about it”, he shared with CinemaBlend.
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