Road Worriers

 

I'M THIINKING OF ENDING THINGS (B+) - If only Charlie Kaufman had a good editor or perhaps a collaborator who could tell him when it's time to quit while he's ahead. He had a much better batting average as a writer than as a director (compare "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" with "Synecdoche, New York" and "Anomalisa"), the difference between getting A's and getting B's. 

Here, he follows a couple on a trek through a blizzard to meet his parents while she is contemplating "ending things," which likely is a reference to breaking up with the shlub or -- and this is where some viewer might relate -- simply flinging the passenger door open and jumping to her death. Our Gal Jessie Buckley ("Wild Rose"), identified in the credits as Young Woman, because, this being another Kaufman fever dream, her name and identity (and clothing) will change during the course of a full two-and-a-quarter hours. She is figuratively being held hostage -- in the car and relationship -- with Jake (Jesse Plemons from "The Game"). Her thoughts open the dialogue of the movie, and they will essentially narrate the proceedings throughout.

But Kaufman is playing a mind trick here, as is apparent as the narrative unfolds. Long car trips through this treacherous snowfall dominate both ends of the film, with a bizarre intermezzo where we actually meet Jake's parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis, both struggling to find just the right absurdist tone), who change ages throughout the dinner visit, from newlyweds to death-bed invalids. It doesn't take long to figure out that this movie is more about Jake and his embarrassment over his roots and his insecurity in the relationship.   

If Kaufman has focused more on the car scenes and trusted his two actors to talk out their relationship -- albeit using obscure pop-culture reference to make the filmmaker's points -- this would have been a fascinating study of two millennials coming to grips with what they have created. But the detour to the silly parents feels like a drag. And then Kaufman, for the ending, off-roads it into some truly rough terrain, as Jake insists on making a pit stop his old at high school.

The film peaks with an interpretive dance in the hallways featuring two younger and idealized versions of Jake and his girlfriend. It's at that moment that Kaufman might have had a masterpiece in the making. But then! He doubles and triples down on this bizarre fantasy sequence, dive-bombing into old musicals, lifting dialogue verbatim. Before long, for reasons perhaps only Kaufman can explain, we eventually see an elderly janitor strolling the hallways with a diseased pig. By the time this wraps up, it all feels like a missed opportunity -- at the service of Kaufman's idiosyncrasies -- and all that work that Buckley and Plemons put into this gets tossed aside and marginalized. 

It's a shame, because when "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" is good, it's very good. But when the air starts to seep out of it, it's difficult to go back and appreciate those good parts.

THE LOAD (2019) (B+) - This nugget from last year takes us back to 1999, when NATO was bombing Serbia in support of Kosovo, as we follow Vlada (Leon Lucev), who drives a truck from Kosovo to Belgrade not knowing what he's carrying in the back compartment. Don't ask, don't tell, as the era advised.

For much of the trip, Vlada is joined by 18-year-old Paja (Pavle Cemerekic), a free spirit who looks more toward the future (and perhaps an escape to Germany) than Vlada, who is haunted by the past and worn down by a decade of war in the former Yugoslavia. Vlada carries with him his father's lighter, which was a booby prize from World War II. The inscription on the lighter, from 1958, marks the 15th anniversary of the Battle of Sutjeska, which was somewhat of a last gasp by the Nazis and Italians against the Yugoslav resistance.   

Vlada and Paja take a detour to a tiny Serbian town, where, while they are crashing a wedding party, a couple of punks steal the lighter out of the truck. Vlada tries to chase them and ends up at Popina Memorial Park, which features large triangular structures with big holes cut out of their middles, allowing them to appear, from the proper perspective, to be nested within one another (below).

In this way, Vlada, beaten down by the endless slog of war and under siege by the new generation of Allies teaming up under the NATO banner, is journeying through the past, to a time when the valiant Serbs (led by Tito, the future communist Grand Papa of Yugoslavia) dispatched the bad guys and made the world safer. Vlada eventually returns home to his wife and son, and the film ends on a grand story that Vlada tells to his son about Vlada's own war-veteran father and that father's brother, who did not survive that battle of Sutjeska. It's a powerful, heart-warming allegory that in itself is worth the price of admission here.

Much of the film can seem like a tedious road trip, with not much action or explication. We never definitively find out what's in the back of that truck, but your first guess is probably a good one, and writer-director Ognjen Glavonic (in an impressive feature debut) wisely refuses to spell out everything so literally. As Vlada, Lucev cuts a hulking shaggy presence, resembling a gruff cross between Joaquin Phoenix and Jim Belushi. He figuratively carries the weight of this film on his shoulders, and he makes you care about this melancholy deep dive into the horrors and the cycles of war.