I thought the pig was very cool. Other than that, the ever compounding navel-gazing nihilism of characters bored with their own inadequacy, and their inability to communicate anything meaningful beyond standard intellectual tropes, was a bummer. The movie -- because otherwise it wouldn't be Kaufman-- is pedantically self-aware, which extends to the protagonists who frequently engage in off-handed existential debates without conviction. Sure, that is kind of the point. But there is something obnoxiously joyless about taking fairly interesting concepts (TV-show plots are like viruses that just want to find a home in our minds/ Peoples' selves are not their 'own creations', and more of a mosaic of opinions and facts they have absorbed from others/etc) and scattering them onto every other scene, merely to have the characters make one more remark upon whose conclusion they can look miserably out the window.
As many have said, the basic idea behind the movie, combined with the apt setting of a road trip, a creepy farm, the rural menacing tedium in general, has a lot of potential to create an unnerving atmosphere. Had the movie been more grounded, had there been more actually coherent scenes --less inter-cutting, fewer abrupt transitions, fewer aggressive 4th wall-breaking-- it might have managed to be unsettling. As Kaufman chose to construct it, it never convinces you (never tries, actually) that anything within it is more than a clever artifice propped up to sermonize about the various dreadful aspects of the human condition. The film can't help but constantly blow its load and become very very explicit about its themes and how much of a surreal fantasy it is, as opposed to a straightforward narrative, so that it rarely manages to create a visceral moment of tension. There's also a weird amnesiac quality to it: Sometimes the narrative will forget about the multitude of loads already blown, and after having served up what seems like a complete deconstruction of the plot, tries to return to a sense of normalcy, as though nothing has happened. At these points, the execution doesn't seem willfully idiosyncratic anymore, and rather just shoddy.
However, by sheer virtue of the great acting and universally relatable themes being brought up over and over again (what is success? aging is scary; dying is scary; being a nobody is scary; what is art; what it's purpose?) it can become 'engrossing' and thought provoking. But even when thoughts were provoked, I felt annoyed at the bluntness and self-indulgence of the scenes giving rise to them. Side-note: visually the movie had some truly high heights, but was as inconsistent as its structure. In my view it should have been much darker, less saturated, which would not only have fit the story better, but also made sense in that the cinematographer already showed the amazing atmospheres he's capable of creating in Ida.
Not that anybody should give a damn, but this may be the movie that makes me change my mind about Kaufman (still, I will always love Being John Malkovich). I read the book only because I heard about this film-project, and even though I wasn't fully amazed by it, it was the much more interesting experience among the two. Whereas the novel had a fresh angle, this just felt like "Kaufman film #X": The protagonists are not people --not even archetypes-- but collections of abstract sentiments; there is dreamlike/meta-stuff, that has an awkward theatrical vibe; everybody is sort of miserable by default; things seem somewhat normal at the beginning, and head towards a crescendo of self-reference and incoherent existential musings.
He did it much better in Synecdoche (in a sense, the protagonists of both stories try to accomplish a similar thing in very different ways). This one feels like a remake of that movie that wasn't constructed from the ground up, but instead injected into and parasitically reared in the body of a pretty decent and sparse, albeit mostly unrelated, horror novel. I think it is worth watching, however, because it's the kind of work whose potency may very much vary, depending on the mood you're in. Being far from an optimistic, jolly person myself, I personally still found myself not only bored, but acutely annoyed, by Kaufman's thousandth attempt to show us the hypocrisy, arbitrariness and wretched misery that is apparently the life of every vaguely self-reflective modern middle class individual.
As many have said, the basic idea behind the movie, combined with the apt setting of a road trip, a creepy farm, the rural menacing tedium in general, has a lot of potential to create an unnerving atmosphere. Had the movie been more grounded, had there been more actually coherent scenes --less inter-cutting, fewer abrupt transitions, fewer aggressive 4th wall-breaking-- it might have managed to be unsettling. As Kaufman chose to construct it, it never convinces you (never tries, actually) that anything within it is more than a clever artifice propped up to sermonize about the various dreadful aspects of the human condition. The film can't help but constantly blow its load and become very very explicit about its themes and how much of a surreal fantasy it is, as opposed to a straightforward narrative, so that it rarely manages to create a visceral moment of tension. There's also a weird amnesiac quality to it: Sometimes the narrative will forget about the multitude of loads already blown, and after having served up what seems like a complete deconstruction of the plot, tries to return to a sense of normalcy, as though nothing has happened. At these points, the execution doesn't seem willfully idiosyncratic anymore, and rather just shoddy.
However, by sheer virtue of the great acting and universally relatable themes being brought up over and over again (what is success? aging is scary; dying is scary; being a nobody is scary; what is art; what it's purpose?) it can become 'engrossing' and thought provoking. But even when thoughts were provoked, I felt annoyed at the bluntness and self-indulgence of the scenes giving rise to them. Side-note: visually the movie had some truly high heights, but was as inconsistent as its structure. In my view it should have been much darker, less saturated, which would not only have fit the story better, but also made sense in that the cinematographer already showed the amazing atmospheres he's capable of creating in Ida.
Not that anybody should give a damn, but this may be the movie that makes me change my mind about Kaufman (still, I will always love Being John Malkovich). I read the book only because I heard about this film-project, and even though I wasn't fully amazed by it, it was the much more interesting experience among the two. Whereas the novel had a fresh angle, this just felt like "Kaufman film #X": The protagonists are not people --not even archetypes-- but collections of abstract sentiments; there is dreamlike/meta-stuff, that has an awkward theatrical vibe; everybody is sort of miserable by default; things seem somewhat normal at the beginning, and head towards a crescendo of self-reference and incoherent existential musings.
He did it much better in Synecdoche (in a sense, the protagonists of both stories try to accomplish a similar thing in very different ways). This one feels like a remake of that movie that wasn't constructed from the ground up, but instead injected into and parasitically reared in the body of a pretty decent and sparse, albeit mostly unrelated, horror novel. I think it is worth watching, however, because it's the kind of work whose potency may very much vary, depending on the mood you're in. Being far from an optimistic, jolly person myself, I personally still found myself not only bored, but acutely annoyed, by Kaufman's thousandth attempt to show us the hypocrisy, arbitrariness and wretched misery that is apparently the life of every vaguely self-reflective modern middle class individual.