I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)

I'm Thinking of Ending Things is a 134-minute film in which approximately an hour is taken up with conversations between an arty couple driving through a snowstorm at night, conversations that touch on Guy Debord and David Foster Wallace and that quote chunks of Pauline Kael's typically wrongheaded review of A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974) (one of the ten greatest feature-length American narrative films of the 1970s, ya know). The other half of the film features a dance number, a production of "Lonely Room" from Oklahoma!, an animated sequence, and a material narrative allowing the characters to interact with one another from different time periods. Not since Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Journey to the Shore (2016) have I seen such a moving mediation on the inability to live in the present. And you thought I was going to come for a film like this? Insufferable, heavy-handed, devastating, rapturous, this is a film of a free man. 

Grade: A- minus