Actually the more I think about this film the less I enjoy it. I keep thinking about how Kaufman could've made this one of the most upsetting/disturbing movies ever made. It's creepy, thats for sure. But instead, he chooses to simply thread surreal/disturbing set pieces together with ruminations on art and media that comes off as incredibly self indulgent. I get what he's going for, I understand why he does it. But it's not something that I walk away from satisfied. I simply walk away exhausted and slightly annoyed. The first half of the film is so brilliant in comparison to the last half. A meditation on the ugliness of a "pathetic", sad person's life, a meditation on memory and its destruction, on lost chances and false hopes, on the sheer ugliness of the maggots that feed on the underbelly of a life led wrong. The atmosphere was so thick it could be cut with a knife. The feeling of going inside an abandoned farmhouse during a blizzard that lacerates and seeing all the sad, desperate ghosts of the pasts walking along empty corridors on a loop looking for something but finding nothing. Its the emotions that the songs of The Caretaker evokes transferred into film format. But that second half slowly trails off into the annoying and self indulgent. I'm sorry, but I just don't think having a character recite the entirety of Pauline Kael's negative review of A Woman Under the Influnce for like six minutes is particularly clever or interesting, no matter how much Charlie Kaufman may think it is.
Review of I'm Thinking of Ending Things
