But who’s to know this? A few scenes earlier, she was channelling the spirit of Pauline Kael (we’ll get to that) and later Jake is going to channel Russell Crowe from A Beautiful Mind and Jud from the musical Oklahoma! When Buckley’s character meets the janitor and says she can barely remember meeting Jake, that he’s a mosquito from 40 years ago, this is reflective of reality. There are some very small breadcrumbs to suggest this. So the “meet the parents” scenario not only never happened, but he didn’t know anything about Buckley’s character other than she was cute, hence the changes in names, occupations and attitudes. Buckley’s character smiled at Jake, but in reality Jake lacked the nerve to speak to her. Before he can decide, he’s trying to imaging “other roads taken.” In the book, the story about the trivia night is true. Here’s more: the entire purpose of the daydream is because the janitor is contemplating killing himself. Inside the daydream … Jessie Buckley in I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
IM THINKING OF ENDING THINGS JESSE MOVIE
You can kinda-sorta intuit that there is a connection between the janitor and what’s happening at the time-shifting farmhouse with William Morris print wallpaper (his clothes are in the washing machine), but having the movie told, with voiceover, from the perspective of Buckley’s character, only to actually be from the mind of the janitor is a leap my puny mind never made.
(Even though they have iPhones in the vision that’s the least of the confusing bits.) The man Jesse Plemons plays, Jake, is a projection of the janitor decades earlier. The woman (or women, perhaps more accurately) that Jessie Buckley plays is a fantasy. Here goes: the entire movie is a daydream inside the mind of the janitor you see periodically. This is a safe space to admit we got confused. So let’s take a long drive through snowy Oklahoma (without safety belts!) and talk about this weird move. Imagine watching The Usual Suspects but without the shot of Chazz Palminteri recognising all the names and places on the bulletin board behind him. You’ll get a general sense of the themes Kaufman is going for in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, but once you read what he’s stripped out of the story, it makes it feel a little hollow.
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