After establishing himself solidly as a screenwriter with a plethora of wilfully leftfield but often captivating ideas, from Being John Malkovich through to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Charlie Kaufman struck out on his own as a director with Synecdoche: New York and Anomalisa, and it immediately became apparent that just being a font of creativity is not enough to make a fully-realised film. This one just confirms that judgement.
It starts with a couple driving through a blizzard to his parents' farm, with her constantly musing in voice-over about the uneasiness she feels about the future of their relationship, and when they do exchange dialogue, it only serves to trouble the waters further. This raises the alarming fear that the rest of the film will continue along the same trajectory of melancholic, teenage navel-gazing, so it comes as a welcome relief when they do get to the farm to be met by his parents, played by the ever-excellent David Thewlis and Toni Collette, who are both bags of quirks: his, suggestive goading and hers, barely-contained hysteria. When reality suddenly goes totally off-kilter, with the parents ageing and de-ageing from one moment to the next, it starts to feel like we may be headed into the dark waters of Get Out, and this is a promising turn. But Kaufman clearly does not know when he's on to a good thing, and so soon they leave, with Thewlis and Collette criminally discarded, and we're back to the couple in the car again, for the remaining one and a half hours of the film's running time, any sense of purpose dissipating faster than the contents of their petrol tank. This means random stops just to throw in freakish characters or interludes, scattered through the couple going through a random list of artistic/popular culture/philosophical conversation topics and assumed personae, to no coherent end at all.
Jessie Buckley and Jess Plemons, playing the couple, do make a Herculean effort to demonstrate the versatility that this demands of them, but it's like applauding skilled builders doing their best to follow a blueprint for a house of sand. There is no design, just a collage of clippings from the director's scrapbook, in the pseud hope that something meaningful about the human condition will miraculously be produced just through bunging them all together. It makes the approach of even Michel Gondry, who directed his script on Eternal Sunshine, look measured and focused, and on this evidence, it's Kaufman who really should be thinking of ending things.
4/10
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