Last Call: I'M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS

Charlie Kaufman’s exhilarating and exasperating I’m Thinking of Ending Things begins with a sustained sequence of skin-crawling social discomfort, and it only gets worse from there. It’s a brilliant nightmare. The film conjures a psychologically claustrophobic vice grip and proceeds to send it in twists, twists, twists. With each moment it tightens, almost unendurably, as the tension grows. The emotions are hyper-focused, but the details start slipping. At first it’s two people in a car, a long snowy trip. She (Jessie Buckley) tells us in voice over that she’s thinking of ending things. Not a great start. He (Jesse Plemons) is her boyfriend. They’re driving to meet his parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) at their far-off farmhouse. It’ll be her first time. So that is understandably tense. It’s worse when they get there—right at sunset, eerily quiet, snow threatening to turn into a blizzard, animals dead by the barn. Life’s hard on a farm, he says. Then there are the parents: awkward, nervous, needling, full of ticks, both over-accommodating and passive aggressive. It’s all a bit much. And this is before the young woman’s name starts casually changing, and then everyone seems much older all of a sudden, and how much time has passed? And wait, wasn’t she a poet? Or a painter? Or is that a physicist or gerontologist or cinephile? The longer we stay in this house, the cuts grow disjunction between details—a dog here, then there, then…where? Does it seem that the living room is also a hospital room, at the same time? Lukaz Zal’s chilly camerawork and Robert Frazen’s sharp editing are hyper-focused on Molly Hughes’ precise production design — every kitschy prop placed just so — but slips, elides. It’s like one of those nightmares where you’re in a familiar place that’s simultaneously unfamiliar.

It makes perfect sense, except when it doesn’t. It’s strange, except when it isn’t. In typical Kaufman fashion — screenwriter of Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s clever reality-bending wiliness, and writer-director of the dizzyingly existential Synecdoche, New York — the film is a construct meant to jolt us into contemplation, making its rabbit-hole philosophical rumination vivid, tactile. The longer it goes on, the more we realize we’re trapped with these people, straining to figure them out, squinting to reconcile the slow drip of strange details, stylistic flourishes, strange in-jokes, dazzling monologues, creepy Lynchian asides, long dark roads to nowhere, Oklahoma!, Pauline Kael, horror movies, snow tires, milkshakes, A Beautiful Mind, David Foster Wallace, a shuffling janitor, rapidly aging parents, mental slippage, enervating couples’ arguments, stilted silences, and an animated pig. In the end it’s about the inevitability of age, decay, and death, the uncertainty of life, the strange dysfunctions we pass on to those around us, and the sad slow process of realizing we can’t ever really know anyone. The road there is obsessively detailed, the plot at once baroque and skeletal, the performances ice-pick perfect and tightrope dazzling, while the emotions get razored into the fabric of reality itself, leaving all frayed. And somehow the whole thing is both intuitive and inscrutable. In other words, it’s a Charlie Kaufman picture.

Puppet Show: ANOMALISA

Anomalisa is a small movie set mostly in one hotel room over the course of one night, focused claustrophobically on one man’s self-important feelings of loneliness and dejection. It also manages to be a story that could only be told through animation. That’s certainly not a pair of cinematic ideas you see every day. Call it stop-motion mumblecore, I suppose, if you’re fumbling for a taxonomic foothold. It follows intricately manipulated puppets, human figures at once totally obviously fake and uncannily real, flickers of subtle emotion and natural gestures behind soft textures and noticeable seams. The main character is a motivational speaker (David Thewlis) who is deep inside an impenetrable fog of sadness and melancholy, solipsistic narcissism mixed with downbeat misery. We watch as he stays in a hotel, a perfect dollhouse recreation of humdrum quotidian details, trying to avoid contemplating his unhappiness.

He has ceased engaging with the world outside his head in any meaningful way. Part of his problem is seeing everyone else as an undifferentiated sea of boring people hardly worth considering as individuals. Driving the point home, every other puppet has the same face, and speaks with the voice of Tom Noonan, sounding unusually soft and dull. The fog threatens to lift when the speaker meets a shy woman who passes the time chatting with him, first in the hotel bar, then in his room. She’s not like everyone else in his eyes. Her face looks unlike the others’. And her voice is not the dry monotone of strangers and family alike, but a hesitant and warm lilting Jennifer Jason Leigh speaking. They stay up talking and drinking, drawing closer and more intimate as the night goes on. They may be animated, but they connect on something like a human level.

And so the movie proceeds as a tiny, contained talky character piece with subtext laid out on the surface through consciously artificial but fairly low energy style. Written and co-directed by Charlie Kaufman (whose tangled, layered, high-concept screenplays looped so strangely and pleasingly in Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) the film represents his most restrained narrative ideas – a simple night of connection temporarily curing loneliness before an ultimate relapse into disconnection – told through obvious metaphor. Like his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, a wild, sprawling, and odd contemplation of mortality and thwarted ambition, Anomalisa has a precisely calibrated feeling of tracing endlessly through a man’s troubled mind. However, it’s much smaller, more contained, less strange – an unfolding emotional and psychological breakdown, but one of quiet desperation.

Working with stop-motion director Duke Johnson (probably best known for two claymation episodes of the unsustainable sitcom Community), Kaufman creates a film that’s alive when the man and the woman have their alone time together in conversation that’s tender and surprisingly real. The disjunction in seeing puppet people share convincing and adult emotional terrain together is both weirdly touching and a little funny, never more so than in a sweet a cappella rendition of a Cyndi Lauper song. But as Kaufman backs away from a more literal flavor into something more abstract – listen for Noonan’s voice filtering through in a sad fading of individuality – the movie becomes both more and less interesting.

Hermetically sealed and quietly felt, it’s a movie most true in moments between two people talking, and most false when it’s all supposed to match up with the overarching metaphor. Asking questions about what it means to be human through the plastic visages of unreal people, it finds only elaborately produced overfamiliarity. The whole thing is filled with awkward silences and padded with tedious normal tasks laboriously realistically portrayed. The imagery is so spare and normal it could be unusually detailed animatics for a live action shoot. It’s strange, a lot of work to detail and animate a world that’s basically like our own, for no reason other than to support the elaborate metaphor for self-inflicted misanthropic isolation on display. Tom Noonan playing all but two characters, every man, woman, and child, simply wouldn’t fly in live action, but here erodes any sense of connection to emotional reality anyway. It's mixture of real fake locations and fake real emotions left me cold.

It’s a movie concerned with a man’s sadness, and finds it all very poignant how he can’t even selfishly use a woman’s company on a business trip to break him away from his dull suburban family life, when really he’s self-absorbed. I was sold on the dispiriting soul-crushing mood, but not so much on why it’s supposed to be inherently interesting to find a man trapped in his own sad circle of cold detachment. Sad sack misanthropic self-help expert can’t help himself. Oh, the irony. There’s only so much sad puppet man moping I could take. Ultimately, Anomalisa is one of those movies that is exactly and completely the thing it wants to be. That thing just isn’t for me. It drifted away from my interest as it followed its hollow obsessions into emotional tedium.

Paws of Fury: KUNG FU PANDA 2

Dreamworks Animation’s Kung Fu Panda 2, like Kung Fu Panda before it, delivers lively action sequences (and slapstick) with choreography capable of equaling, even besting, live-action adventure. Animation has the possibility to be the triumph of imagination over practicality, and here that’s completely the case with characters flipping, punching, flying, kicking, and stomping through intricate hand-to-hand combat in ways that would simply be too dangerous and impractical to ask of real creatures. In the summer of 2008, Kung Fu Panda had the best action sequences you could find on the big screen. I’m not so sure 2 will end up in a similar place – the novelty’s gone, for one thing – but it sure is fun.

The first film, set in a medieval China populated solely by anthropomorphized English-speaking animals, featured Po (Jack Black), a roly-poly panda, discovering his true calling to be a kung fu master. He trained with red panda Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) to become one of a group of kung fu masters (a Lucy Liu viper, an Angelina Jolie tiger, a Jackie Chan monkey, a David Cross crane, and a Seth Rogen mantis) who protect a humble little valley. That film gained its fun and its momentum from the challenges in the training of the Kung Fu Panda as he prepared to help his new colleagues defeat an outside threat to their safety.

In good sequel form, Kung Fu Panda 2 ups the ante. There’s an evil peacock (Gary Oldman) who has become determined to take over China by harnessing the power of fireworks to blast away any kung fu challenge that comes his way. His first step towards this goal took place a couple dozen years earlier when, after receiving a prophecy that a black and white warrior would defeat him, he slaughtered a village of innocent pandas. One panda, a baby, managed to escape unharmed and was found and adopted by a noodle-cooking goose (James Hong). That panda was Po. So, this time the conflict’s personal, but only for the audience at first. Po doesn’t know where he came from, and his adopted father only knows so much. It’s a mystery to him.

Rather than merely recycle the plot beats of the earlier film, screenwriters Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger (with uncredited assistance from Charlie Kaufman) take the opportunity to flesh out the backstory of the central character. Rooting the new plot’s impetus in Po’s past, along with his desire to learn more about it, helps to propel the emotions as well as the action, giving it a bit of pleasing depth. The fighting animals head off across the wilderness once they hear that this peacock has taken over his ancestral town and is planning to use it as a base from which to launch his dastardly deeds. With the mystery of Po’s origins weighing heavily on the plotting, exposition here is given a satisfying kick of emotion.

Under the direction of Jennifer Yuh Nelson, the animation is gorgeously rendered, tactile and fluid, beautifully lit in all the right ways. This could be a film just to look at, worth the price of admission just to stare. But luckily the story the visuals tell is worthy of attention as well, though it feels a bit too formulaic in its structure, which isn’t helped by the opening prologue that tells the audience all about the panda massacre which robs Po’s late discovery of much of it’s power. But he’s searching not just for information. Most importantly, he’s searching for a way to find inner peace. It may be trite, it may be an easy indefinable plot point, but it’s also a quest imbued with such elemental qualities that it’s hard to argue with it.

It’s not a film of zen meditation and grim personal history. There’s boundless irrepressible energy that pushes the whole thing forward. Not just a fast zip to the credits, this is a speedy sprightly delight with a surprising level of emotion. It’s a fun time even though, with an all-too-obvious structure and an inelegantly deployed ensemble (other than Po, characterization remains surface level), I felt the fun was ultimately a little less than what the first film dished out. This is shaping up to be a fine series of kung fu movies for kids, and one that feels respectful of the live-action genre used as inspiration. And if some of those kids, as they get a little older, feel driven to dive deeper into said genre, that could only be an added value to cinephilia.

Added note: It’s a shame that a fun teaser of a final scene, that hints at a direction for a future plot line, is separated from the end credits by the words “The End.” Who do they think they’re fooling?