There aren't many creators in Hollywood who can be called geniuses, but Charlie Kaufman, who is the director of the editors and directors, is definitely one.
"Become John Markovich", "The Eternal Sunshine of a Beautiful Mind", "New York Metaphor", "Aberration"... Whether or not the guide is in his hands, films written by Charlie Kaufman always have distinctly personal features.
In it, he dissects the projection of romance and desire, constructs the space of memories and subconscious, opens the brain and heart to invite the audience to enter the tour, and makes each story a journey of "becoming Charlie Kaufman".
Charlie Kaufman's latest work, adapted from Ian Reid's novel of the same name, I Want to End It All, is also such a strange journey through time and consciousness.
"I want to end it all"
Between a snowstorm ride and a farm hut plastered with retro wallpaper, "I Want to End It All" doesn't seem complicated: A curly-haired girl in a sweater and her boyfriend Jack, who has only been together for six weeks, visit jack's parents at his hometown.
However, this parent-meeting story is not Ben Stiller's confrontation with Robert de Niro, after a large conversation in the opening window glass, with the arrival of Jack's hometown as a node, "I Want to End It All" begins to become strange and abnormal.
Snow-falling cars in the grass, dogs that sway too much, girls' sweater colors and jewelry constantly changing, Jack's parents travel back and forth between middle-aged and elderly forms, and in the dialogue, the girl's name, occupation, and story of her acquaintance with Jack are staged in various mutually exclusive versions.
Meanwhile, the daily routine of an elderly cleaner is interspersed in the main story, and he seems to peek through the snow curtain and seep into the journey of Jack and the girl.
I Want to End It All, a film that is occupied by trickery, parody, lots of dropped-bag dialogue, puzzling details, and inner monologues that seem to be heard by each other, is indeed somewhat obscure.
Fortunately, although the heroine's perspective is a subtle smoke bomb, although the amount of information in the film is so large that it is like a snowflake that comes to the audience's face, Charlie Kaufman has no intention of playing brain-burning or reversing in this film.
Hints and clues are sprinkled throughout the film: misidentified childhood photos, small rooms filled with memory totems, Bone Dogs, Pauline Kyle's film reviews, Ice Cream Parlor and Oklahoma, cleaner uniforms in the washing machine...
Rather than a piecemeal puzzle, I Want to End It All is more like a maze of exits, a two-way dialogue tailored to each audience.
No matter where the audience solves the clues, gets the key to the maze, and before the end, they can sort out the real story line of "I Want to End It All".
(Major spoilers below)
The protagonist of "I Want to End It All" is not the eccentric and wandering curly-haired girl, but the elderly cleaner Jack. In old Jack's day-to-day fantasies, the young self is taking a perfect girlfriend home to meet his parents.
The ideal girl is a painter and a physicist, who can write poetry and talk about movies, and she is everything Jack dreamed of becoming but not being able to be. In her mouth, Jack is smart and romantic, and is seen and recognized.
But "I Want to End It All" isn't a beautiful affair that's just about fantasy. For me, the most fascinating thing about this film is that it tries to show how the restless fears and non-stop self-loathing and self-blame in the real world can erode fantasy like a snowstorm.
In the end, the brain world and reality collapse synchronously, and the fantasy product and the subject come together to the state of "I want to end all this".
As a product of fantasy and the heroine of the narrative perspective, it is the figurative embodiment of this erosion and collapse.
"I Want to End It All" cleverly borrows the two sides of the heroine's so-called perfect lover, and since the girl can carry Jack's false fantasies about romance and success, she will definitely become the ultimate spokesperson for Jack the cleaner's self-doubt and uneasiness.
The ice cream cup filled with trash cans outside the high school building seems to prove that Jack and the girl's fantasy journey has been going on for many years, circulating many times, and maintaining the old cleaner's work like a ventilator of the mind.
But perhaps because the old cleaner dissected his sad life more and more clearly in reality, and his sense of doubt and unworthiness became deeper and deeper, his changes led to the girls in the fantasy world.
That's why the girl gets an inexplicable call, and on the other end of the phone, the old cleaner's voice is full of fear and anxiety; she will accuse Jack of only knowing how to imitate and quote, and his head is against the car window and silently reads: "I want to end all this."
Outside of the girls, although the elderly Jack occupies a short time on the screen, he occupies the audience's subconscious like a ghost in the process of the whole film. His subtle emotions and the fragments of his tragic life are projected into the imaginary and beautiful world we are watching.
His fear of age and aging, his reflections on his mother's doting, his questioning of all the clichés and his distrust of the narrative of "you will always meet someone who belongs to you" are like a little missing electromagnetic radiation that seeps into fantasy, twisting the fantasy world into a horror movie.
On Jack's way back from the girl, a key line came out of the girl's mouth: "We stand still, and time passes through us like a cold wind." ”
Although "I Want to End It All" only captures a short journey in Jack's mind and the last short segment of Jack's life, it is clear that Charlie Kaufman captures the cold wind of time in the film, constructing the story of an old cleaner's life into a labyrinth of memories and fantasies.
Jack was sad. He grew up with a lot of love, but no intellectual talent; he longed for love, but he was too cowardly; his parents often quarreled and were ostracized at school, his mother doted on him, and he feared that his father would forget him like the pig on the farm.
After a lonely life, he will only use the language of others to express his thoughts, poorly imitate the lives of others, and then use fantasies to whitewash the peace, until the fantasies also collapse in the snow.
But what is interesting is that although the tone of "I Want to End All This" is sad, its deliberately open ending shows a hint of pessimistic uplift.
When the girl meets Jack the cleaner at the end of her journey, the high school that has completed the tragic closed loop in Jack's life, the meaning of "everything" in "I Want to End It All" is more obvious: ending life, ending fantasies of romantic love, ending endless accusations against the original family, ending senseless ideals and hopes.
In the end, Jack reconciles with his worst nightmare and follows the maggot-laden pig to his own award ceremony.
Although he still steals the speech of "A Beautiful Mind" and ends with a song from "Oklahoma", Jack no longer blames himself for quoting, but peacefully makes those works a part of his eternity.
Even Jack no longer fears aging, and he celebrates his mediocre and lonely life in an old agely posture, along with the same old-age makeup, the important people in his life.
In the final scene, there is no one in the snow, next to the tree outside the high school, the car in which Jack ended his life is buried by the snow, like a white coffin. In this freeze-frame landscape painting, although there are no sad characters, it accurately conveys the saddest emotions.
Whether Jack finally succeeded in committing suicide is no longer important at this point. Jack, who has been imitating all his life, finally completes the first original of his life by ending everything.