The last movie of Charlie kaufman, ‘I’m thinking of quitting’ continues to elicit reactions of all kinds. Netflix’s last big premiere touches fibers that nobody expected and it stands out from everything that the platform had been offering up to now. All this without skipping a single line of what a film by the screenwriter of ‘Adaptation. The Orchid Thief ‘and the director of’ Synecdoche, New York ‘must feature.
The strange journey
With a strange (because everything is strange) mix between ‘The Phantom Cart’ and a social network of long-distance trips by carpool, Charlie Kaufman gets behind the wheel of someone else’s work for the first time and sees a lifetime pass before his eyes. Probably yours. I mean, there’s really nothing new under the sun. Or if. Adaptation of the novel by Ian Reid twist time and space to celebrate the sadness of parting. The easy, the simple, is to stay in its cracked seemingly impenetrable casing. For that reason, it is also easy to reject it.
They say that when you go to die, you see your whole life pass before your eyes. I do not know the compression capacity of that Daydream, but for just over two hours is what Kaufman offers. And he does it with an elegance and a command of the cinematographic language that is outstanding. It’s very difficult to put a story like this into words, turn it into a script, and put it into pictures. Kaufman comes out of the stake more than graceful. Kaufman, like that black hole that absorbs the energy of reason and hope, has decided to leave us dry.
Lucy, Louisa or whatever her name is, awaits her partner under the idyllic snow. Family dinner winter is coming and it’s time to take that step at her boyfriend’s family’s old farm. Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons, plus a third and mysterious character who seems to know everything they embark on a strange journey full of symbolism, philosophical conversations, film theory, lectures on the musical genre and ice cream. All this through a muted and blurred landscape that seems to consciously change the direction of Oklahoma.
A life before your eyes
As in Reid’s book, the first act is more or less a philosophical exchange of about 20 minutes that, unlike what happened in the recent ‘The Vast of Night’, where the entire first act was wasted between talks that they were not going anywhere and that they did not serve to better know any of the characters. But of course, here we are talking about an author who has signed the librettos of ‘How to be John Malkovich’ and ‘Forget about me!’. Some of the disenchantment and the bad body that life leaves you knows the now also novelist Kaufman.
Life and death, beginning and end, pigs and ice cream. If in the original material he extracts horror from blood and fear, something that becomes clear in the visit to the farm animals, Kaufman’s interpretation adds a layer of existentialism and the inevitability of aging. Those frozen bodies, like the swings that appear in the middle of an inhospitable place, are just two of the small details that show how well Kaufman handles himself in the territory of dreams.
Those landscapes, the sudden arrivals at destinations that seem to come out of nowhere, the voids that surround those spaces, the dog. Our destiny. If we consider ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ as one of the best translations of the fever dream into images, Kaufman’s film perfects it, because it does so through dialogue and situations. Also with images, but the weight, the desolation, is different. More tangible, even.
Although Kaufman insists on ending with the pat on the back, with the encouragement, with the standing ovation, we cannot avoid fear fate with great condolences that awaits us and before which we will end up naked.