2017’s Mother! was the most boring, insufferably pretentious twaddle I’d seen in years.
I figured a long, long time would pass before something similarly overblown arrived.
Wrong.
When Jake (Jesse Plemons, far left) brings his girlfriend (Jessie Buckley, standing) to
meet his parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis), their "friendly dinner" quickly
turns increasingly peculiar.
Writer/director Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of novelist Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things — debuting on Netflix — actually is worse.
For all its failings, Mother! is an obvious allegory that builds to a graspable conclusion. Kaufman’s film offers no such relief in its final act, which grows more aggressively obtuse by the minute. Indeed, he ignores the resolution in Reid’s similarly weird book — which at least partially justifies what has come before — in favor of more eye-rolling stuff ’n’ nonsense.
Not 10 minutes into this unbearable 134-minute slog, a little voice in the back of your head will start screaming, “Abandon ship. Now.”
Be smart. Pay attention to it.
The frustrating thing is, Kaufman isn’t a talent to be ignored. (Sometimes.) His vivid imagination and defiantly non-linear storytelling style exploded with 1999’s Being John Malkovich, brought him an Oscar for 2002’s Adaptation, and demonstrated sheer genius with 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
It should be noted, however, that those films found Kaufman working alongside equally outré directors — Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry — who knew how to check the screenwriter’s more ludicrous tendencies. When Kaufman directs his own material — as with 2008’s Synecdoche, New York and 2015’s Anomalisa — the results are unwatchable.
As is the case here.
Our protagonist and voiceover narrator is an unnamed young woman (Jessie Buckley) who, somewhat against her better judgment, agrees to a day trip to visit boyfriend Jake’s (Jesse Plemons) parents at their secluded farm. She’s been thinking of ending the relationship — she repeatedly informs us, as things proceed — out of, I dunno, boredom, dissatisfaction, whatever.
She and Jake chat at length during this initial car trip, as they pass along the bleak and barren Oklahoma countryside. Their conversation rises from the depths of mundane banality, to the heights of philosophical speculation. She’s a quantum physicist — or maybe she’s a poet — or maybe she’s a student with a paper due Wednesday, on “Susceptibility to rabies infection in the sensory dorsal root ganglia neurons.”
Their increasingly dreary nattering goes on … and on … and on … and on … for what feels like days (but is “only” 23 minutes).
Cinematographer Lukasz Zal’s point of view never shifts throughout this increasingly pointless exchange: The lens stares straight at them, through the windshield, as if he’s perched on the car hood the entire time. (This could be A Clue. You won’t care.)
Up to this point, things are merely boring. Once we reach Jake’s parent’s home, we slide into the aggressively strange.
Mother (Toni Collette), who suffers from painful tinnitus, constantly giggles at her own terrible jokes, like somebody on a marijuana high. Father (David Thewlis), who appears benign, nonetheless invades one’s space by leaning close-close-close. Mother serves a feast that could feed a squadron; the food remains untouched. Jake displays serious rage issues.
One suspects Kaufman intends this atmospheric shift to be unsettling, perhaps even sinister. If so, he fails; it’s just bizarre and off-putting.
Our heroine has trouble with the details of how she and Jake met. Is it memory loss … or is she making stuff up as she goes along?
Jake and his parents begin to refer to her by different names; after a moment’s disorientation, she repeatedly accepts this and moves on. She wanders the house, discovers a typical family photo gallery, and spots a picture that looks like a younger version of herself.
As she moves from one room to another, Mother and Father age unexpectedly, then get much younger, then become infirm.
At about this point, we realize that Kaufman — much the way he eschewed linear narrative, in the past — is messing with point of view. We’ve been saddled with an unreliable narrator, which means nothing can be taken at face value.
All this nonsense notwithstanding, Buckley deserves credit for gamely making this “young woman” — as she’s identified in the credits — reasonably sympathetic, and somewhat compelling. But she cannot overcome Kaufman’s relentless eccentricity.
Jake finally relents to her increasingly agitated desire to return home, and (oh, gawd, no!) we’re back in the car, watching them chat via that same framed windshield. Now it’s nighttime, and snowing heavily, so we see even less of them.
Let’s see … subsequent detours involve a stop at a Dairy Queen-esque ice cream parlor dubbed Tulsey Town, inexplicably open in the dead of night, and staffed by three odd young women; and Jake’s former high school, staffed by an elderly janitor (Guy Boyd) who we’ve watched cleaning the deserted hallways, during brief cutaway sequences throughout the entire film.
As for the final sequence … it absolutely defies description, except that I’m pretty sure Rodgers and Hammerstein wouldn’t approve.
By this point, Kaufman has completely violated the spirit of Reid’s book, which at least offers an explanation (which apparently did little to satisfy most readers who slogged through his 224 pages). Kaufman just spins into the stratosphere, defying us to think any less of his “ending.”
I accept that challenge, Charlie: Your film is mind-numbing, self-indulgent rubbish.
At its core, all the meandering aside, this is a 15-minute premise stretched way beyond its capacity to sustain interest. I kept thinking how a master fantasist — such as Richard Matheson, Roald Dahl or Charles Beaumont — could have made this a chilling, 15-page short story; and how, in turn, Rod Serling could have transformed it into a terrific 30-minute Twilight Zone entry.
Kaufman, instead, merely wastes our time.
I agree. You said it well.
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