Charlie Kaufman movies that don't involve Charlie Kaufman

When you saw the trailer for Dream Scenario, your first thought may have been "Oh, this must be Charlie Kaufman's latest." The presence of Nicolas Cage, star of the Kaufman-written Adaptation, might have cemented that impression.

Of course, if you follow Kaufman with any degree of closeness, you'd know that Dream Scenario could only represent an earlier incarnation of the writer-turned-director. His 2020 film I'm Thinking of Ending Things -- which was my #1 of that year -- certainly indicates that he's on to much less accessible fare.

In his film about a man who suddenly starts entering everyone's dreams, even the people who don't know him, Dream Scenario director Kristoffer Borgli is certainly successful in the homage he's paying to this earlier version of Kaufman. If you want to know how successfully, you'll have to wait until my rankings are up on January 23rd. (Or, wait a few days until I write my review, which will be linked to the right.)

What I can write about today, without spoiling my impression of the film, is that it reminded me that we have a whole subgenre of films that seem as though they should have been written or directed (or both) by Kaufman -- and that Dream Scenario feels like the first we've gotten in a while. Just as soon as I venture the idea that these sorts of mindbinders might be approaching extinction, though, I think of a second one from this very year, in addition to Dream Scenario.

Here are the ones that immediately came to mind, in no particular order. In order to narrow things down a bit, I'll limit this to the time period Kaufman was actually working. 

Stranger Than Fiction (2006, Marc Forster) - Will Ferrell can hear the woman who is narrating his life as she speaks. An existential conceit straight out of the Kaufman playbook, released during the peak period of Kaufman's influence on popular films.

Cold Souls (2009, Sophie Barthes) - Is it possible Paul Giamatti has never actually appeared in a Kaufman film? He's Kaufman's perfect schlub. Here he plays an actor trying to disentangle his emotions from the emotions of his characters, who pays for a service to have his soul placed in cold storage. I can only remember this being a bit disappointing. Anyway, shades of Synecdoche, New York all over this. 

Fingernails (2023, Christos Nikou) - Here's that one from this year. People in relationships have the ability to test whether they love each other by having a fingernail torn out and analyzed. The low-fi analog technology in this film is very reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as is the theme of star-crossed romance.

Vanilla Sky (2001, Cameron Crowe) - I think the cold storage of Cold Souls got me thinking about the ending of this film, which I won't spoil even though the movie is now 23 years old. It's just the sort of intricate script with high concept elements about identity that Kaufman would have dreamed up, though I actually have this ranked higher than any Kaufman film on my Flickchart, so kudos to Crowe for that.

The Truman Show (1998, Peter Weir) - This is a bit of a cheat in that it came out a year before Being John Malkovich. Kaufman was working in television but he had not yet made a movie. But the premise is similar to Dream Scenario in that the world revolves around a single ordinary man, so if Dream Scenario is like a Kaufman film, so is this. 

Click (2006, Frank Coraci) - If it were someone other than Adam Sandler in the title role here, I think this story about a man who literally fast forwards through his life would strike us as more of a Kaufman high concept mindbender. As is even with Sandler, it's pretty poignant and potent at certain parts.

Vivarium (2019, Lorcan Finnegan) - Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots are trapped in an apparently empty neighborhood of identical houses from which there is no escape. The title suggests they are being watched for their reaction. Very Kaufman, and Eisenberg is another who should play a Kaufman surrogate at some point.

Her (2013, Spike Jonze) - It feels like a technicality that Kaufman is not actually involved with this. Jonze directed two of Kaufman's films, so this is sort of a cheat. And while we're cheating anyway ...

The Science of Sleep (2006, Michel Gondry) - If I'm going to list the future work of one Kaufman collaborator, I should list the future work of another. 

Swiss Army Man (2016, Daniel Scheinert & Daniel Kwan) - A buddy comedy between a suicidal man and the talking corpse that helps him find a reason to live? Yep, Kaufman could have written this.

Ruby Sparks (2012, Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris) - While we're already on Paul Dano, this is another one in the Stranger Than Fiction/Adaptation neighborhood, where a written character comes to life and tries to make a Kaufman-like schlub with writer's block happy. 

Moon (2009, Duncan Jones) - I'll let this stand in for a whole category of films featuring clones, as a clone gets at the existential concepts in which Kaufman always dabbles. 

It's becoming clear I could go on for quite a while listing films that narrowly qualify, with diminishing returns. But instead I'll wrap it up with the thought "You get the idea."

One thing I'll say, though, is that even when they fail, they fail in interesting ways. If someone wants to try to make a Charlie Kaufman movie, I'm always game for it -- and I don't want us collectively to forget how to do it, especially now that Kaufman himself doesn't want to be quite so on brand as to have a whole genre unto himself. 

CineNerdle reads The Audient

I've been playing CineNerdle for something like eight months now and I've never even mentioned it to you.

One of the countless online puzzles that grew out of the Wordle craze, as you can tell by its "-rdle" suffix, CineNerdle requires its players to find five movie titles or themes in a 16-box grid. Each title or theme is comprised of four individual boxes. For example, if you had "Space," "Wookiee," "George Lucas" and "It's a Trap," you'd swap boxes until these four appeared on one row or column, and your answer would be Return of the Jedi. (Lucas didn't direct Return of the Jedi, but he is affiliated with it.) You get 15 swaps to find all five themes or movie titles, and the trick is that there's one where each of the first four answers contributes one box to a fifth answer. 

Once you get three, the boxes turn yellow to let you know you're one away. However, sometimes you'll have two series of yellow overlapping crossing the same rows, so all four boxes in one row or column will be yellow, meaning you have to move one of them to a different row or column, thereby wasting precious swaps. 

The original version of CineNerdle involves getting five movie titles from clues that are not the names of movies. Then there is also the reversal version, accessed from a different tab on the game interface, where you are given titles of movies and then need to figure out five themes that relate to four of the movies each. For example, all four of the movies might be directed by Ron Howard or all four might feature Harrison Ford. But then it even gets silly and superficial, like all four movies have a number in the title or all four movies are about a talking duck.

Then there are also logical games, only about a dozen of which have ever been submitted because they are very complicated. There's a grand theme for the puzzle and then clues about where things need to be moved, like "the four movies directed by Quentin Tarantino are in the four corners" but then also "no films featuring Meg Ryan are adjacent to any of the Quentin Tarantino movies." You get five chances to see if your configuration is correct. These are very rewarding but very time consuming, so they don't easily fit into my need to pass the time quickly for five minutes, which is when I usually play.

I was big into CineNerdle when I first started playing. I had exhausted all the puzzles and had to wait for a new one to be released each day. (The benefit of CineNerdle over something like Wordle is you can play all the puzzles in the archive, so you can pick up any time and not miss any of the games that have ever been offered.)

But then during baseball season, I had the more pressing need to read player news updates or even just stare at the accrued stats of my current fantasy players. Yes, there is a lot of starting at information you already know by heart in fantasy baseball, such is the strength of the obsession. So for six months I really fell behind on CineNerdle, and had more than 100 of each of the mainstream types of puzzle waiting to be played, and a handful of the logical. 

Since the normal baseball season ended six weeks ago, I've had a chance to catch up on CineNerdle and now I am in danger of exhausting all the puzzles again. I'll deal with how to pass my time next when that moment arrives and not before. 

Why am I telling you about this today?

Well, two nights ago I played the game you see above you, reversal #163, two of whose themes were particularly appropriate for The Audient. The print is rather small so let me show you in better detail.

This ...

... is four movies directed by Baz Luhrmann. Immediately below that, at least the way I swapped the tiles, this ...

... is four movies directed by Darren Aronofsky.

Unless this is your first day reading The Audient, you would know that two of my three bi-monthly series in 2023 involve re-watching the films of Luhrmann and Aronofsky. And these two of the three are being conducted in the same months, which are February, April, June, August, October and December. 

In Luhrmann's case I'm re-watching the exactly six features he's made, which is easy enough. With Aronofsky, who has made eight, I eliminated the two I had already re-watched within the last two years, which were The Fountain and The Wrestler. The CineNerdle puzzle designer acknowledged that as well, including only titles I was actually re-watching for each series.

To play out the rest of this game and further demonstrate how it all works, the other three answers were:

1) Films directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

2) Films written by Charlie Kaufman.

3) Films about stage productions.

There's no one right way to orient them, by the way. The answers can appear on any row or column as long as their relationship to each other is the same. It's a smartly conceived puzzle engine.

In a way, the other answers here further the notion that the person who submitted this puzzle reads The Audient. Films written by Charlie Kaufman was my bi-monthly theme in 2021, the year after Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things topped my year-end rankings. If you want to go one further, Inarritu also directed a #1 for me, Birdman, so this puzzle also includes three directors who have made one of my #1 films -- even if Kaufman is being acknowledged for his writing here rather than his directing. (He needs to direct one more feature before he will have four.) 

Look I know it's just a coincidence. Aronofsky and Luhrmann are both big directors. They both had 2022 films that were nominated for Oscars, with The Whale actually winning a best actor statue for Brendan Fraser. I still thought it was funny to see it ... and it gave me an excuse to finally sell you on CineNerdle, if you too are always seeking ways to pass five minutes of your time.

In December I will indeed be wrapping both bi-monthly series by re-watching those 2022 Oscar nominees, one of which was my #1 film of 2022. 

A complete inventory of multiple-time #1 people

As I continue to march along in my year of looking back at previous #1s, I've gotten serious about something I used to just track informally.

If you've been following me over the years, you probably know that my 26 #1 movies dating back to when I started this in 1996 have never featured a repeat director. Twenty-six different men and women (and in one instance, a combination of one of each) have been responsible for directing my 26 #1s.

However, that's not to say there are no individual people who have contributed to more than one #1 -- even a director, though he was not the director in his other top finisher(s).

Each year I notice if a new person has joined this illustrious group, usually mentioning it in one of my wrap-up posts. For example, last year I anointed Casey Affleck, who had starred in that year's #1, Our Friend, as well as 2017's #1, A Ghost Story. (Only later, as my repeating viewings of my #1s got going this year, did I realize Affleck is actually in a third #1, Hamlet (2000), very briefly -- making him the second person to be involved with three different #1 movies, and the first to appear on screen in three different ones.)

To this point, though, I've only been keeping track of this casually, in my head. Well, for a list-maker like myself, such informality cannot stand -- especially since it meant I was likely missing some people. And true enough, I was, as we shall see.

So what I did was pull up an Excel spreadsheet and start recording significant contributors to each of my #1 movies, starting with Looking for Richard in 1996 and going all the way through to Our Friend. "Significant," in this case, is defined as the following: 1) the top five to ten actors, or possibly more, depending on the size of the ensemble; 2) any other actors who appear in the cast whose names I recognize; 3) the director; 4) the screenwriter; 5) the names of any producers I recognize; 6) the composer; 7) the cinematographer; 8) the editor. And in one case, the casting director, though I don't expect that to be a regular thing. (Yes, Mary Vernieu has reached the point of ubiquity that once prompted me to write this post about Avy Kaufman.)

"But Vance," you say. "Can you really describe the contributions of Casey Affleck to Hamlet as 'significant'? The guy has no dialogue and appears on the covers of magazines and newspapers more than there is any actual footage of him."

Good question. And the answer is no, Affleck's work on Hamlet is not significant. However, I am not, technically speaking, trying to quantify the value of the contribution here. I am just trying to find a way to limit the people I'm looking at in IMDB to a manageable crowd, so this Excel spreadsheet is not a thousand names long. This group is the ultimate example of getting in on technicalities, and I'll include anyone who I notice is in more than one of these films. But I'm not going to comb the list of art directors and costume designers and key grips and dolly grips to be completist here. I'm already pretty close to completist as it is, going just on the names I've chosen to examine for each film.

Adding the identifiable "significant contributors" to each film didn't produce a list of a thousand names, but it did give me 336, for an average of 12.9 per movie. 

Now, there are some #1s that just have no chance of having any repeat contributors. Out of those 26 films, five are foreign/non-English speaking films. Only two of those are from the same country, Run Lola Run and Toni Erdman, though they are 18 years apart and TE is actually a co-production of multiple countries, not just Germany. And true enough, those movies did not have any contributors in common with any other film, just as A Separation, Beyond the Hills and Parasite had no contributors in common with any other film. I dutifully recorded between five and ten contributors for each movie anyway, given the possibility that these people might be involved in future #1s. 

It ended up being an interesting exercise indeed, and revealed as many as five multiple-timers I had not previously identified. (I say "as many as" because there was one where I couldn't remember if I had noticed him before or not.) I'll get into some stats afterward, but here are the 17 people who have worked on more than one #1, listed in the order in which their second film was chosen by me as a #1. And as you will see, two of them had a third in the offing.

1. Carter Burwell - Hamlet (2000) (composer), Adaptation (2002) (composer)

2. Lance Acord - Adaptation (2002) (cinematographer), Lost in Translation (2003) (cinematographer)

2. Bill Murray - Hamlet (2000) (actor), Lost in Translation (2003) (actor)

4. Jane Adams - Happiness (1998) (actor), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) (actor)

4. Charlie Kaufman - Adaptation (2002) (writer/producer), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) (writer/producer), I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020) (director/writer/producer)

4. Kate Winslet - Titanic (1997) (actor), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) (actor)

7. Clive Owen - Gosford Park (2001) (actor), Children of Men (2006) (actor)

8. Maryse Alberti - Happiness (1998) (cinematographer), The Wrestler (2008) (cinematographer)

9. Clint Mansell - The Wrestler (2008) (composer), Moon (2009) (composer)

9. Kevin Spacey - Looking For Richard (1996) (actor), Moon (2009) (actor)

11. Paul Dano - There Will Be Blood (2007) (actor), Ruby Sparks (2012) (actor/producer)

12. Emmanuel Lubezki - Children of Men (2006) (cinematographer), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) (cinematographer)

13. Kyle MacLachlan - Hamlet (2000) (actor), Inside Out (2015) (actor)

13. Paula Pell - Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) (actor), Inside Out (2015) (actor)

15. Casey Affleck - Hamlet (2000) (actor), A Ghost Story (2017) (actor), Our Friend (2021) (actor)

16. Ethan Hawke - Hamlet (2000) (actor), First Reformed (2018) (actor)

17. Christine Vachon - Happiness (1998) (producer), First Reformed (2018) (producer)

Yes there are a few problematic names in that list -- more problematic than Affleck is of course Kevin Spacey, less problematic (to this point) is Bill Murray. But this list is not based on merit as viewed through a 2022 lens. It's just statistics.

Let's start with the people that this process uncovered:

Lance Acord - I wasn't really familiar with this cinematographer -- I've probably seen the name before -- and it turns out he shot two of my #1s.

Maryse Alberti - You could fill in almost the exact same description for Alberti as for Acord, except swap out the pronoun "he" for "she."

Kyle MacLachlan - I couldn't actually remember if I'd previously noticed this one, so I am including him here just to be sure.

Paula Pell - I wouldn't have noticed this one at all, if Pell hadn't appeared in consecutive #1s and I happened to notice her name in the cast of Birdman, just moments before I noticed it in the cast of Inside Out. Her contributions in both films are minuscule, but hey, as I said earlier, every contribution counts. 

Christine Vachon - I wouldn't have noticed this either if I were not already familiar with her name. Apologies to other producers whose names I don't know, who may have produced more than one of these films. (Given that IMDB lists up to ten names for each film when you consider producers, associate producers and executive producers, it just felt too tedious to include all of them.)

Other interesting tidbits:

- Only three of these contributors appeared in consecutive #1s: Acord, Mansell and Pell.

- Only two English language #1s don't share a contributor with any other film: Hustle & Flow and 127 Hours.

- The most fruitful of these #1s is Hamlet, which shares five contributors with at least one other film (Affleck, Murray, Burwell, MacLachlan and Hawke).

- Kate and Rooney Mara are the only family members who appear in different films (127 Hours and A Ghost Story), though some do appear in the same film (the Coppolas in Lost in Translation)

- Longest gap between first contribution and most recent to a #1: Affleck (Hamlet to Our Friend). Honorable mention: Vachon (Happiness to First Reformed).

- Every role I identified has someone who appears across multiple #1s except director and editor -- and casting director, in which I only found Mary Vernieu in one film.

Random things I discovered during this project:

- Dominique McElligott, who plays Sam Bell's wife in Moon, is also Queen Maeve in The Boys.

- The Dardenne brothers produced the Romanian film Beyond the Hills, opening up a greater possibility of foreign language crossover at some point in the future.

- Doug Jones, who plays creatures in Guillermo del Toro's movies, was also in Adaptation. He plays the caveman in the section of the film where Kaufman imagines back to the start of time.

Probably another waste of your good reading time brought to you by The Audient -- but I had a good time compiling it. 

And I'll be really excited to see if anyone joins the list in January.

I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things: Anomalisa

This is the final installment of a bi-monthly 2021 series rewatching the films of Charlie Kaufman.

I didn't take as many notes during my viewing of Anomalisa as I did during the other six films I watched over five months for this series. While I had been scurrying to identify sometimes minor similarities between the films in the hope of excavating the full thematic breadth of Kaufman's work -- I'm saying that like it's a bad thing -- here I kind of let the totality of the film wash over me on this, my second viewing.

And I landed in about the same spot on the film as I did the first time, finding that I admired it and what it was trying to do without feeling like it totally works.

The first thing it has going for it is, of course, its form. Stop-motion animation has traditionally been used in the service of really outlandish or fantastical stories, so it's fun to absorb the banal imagery captured by the style here, such as a naked middle aged man toweling himself off after a shower, or picked up a large vibrating dildo that he accidentally knocks off the counter at a sex shop that he accidentally visits on the recommendation of a clueless cab driver. While expending much of its energies on the absolutely quotidian aspects of life, and therefore feeling very realistic in that sense, it also calls attention to its own artificiality, revealing the juncture points in the designs of the puppets, and how they threaten to (and sometimes do) fly apart into mechanical malfunction at any moment.

Then also as a positive you have the Kaufman themes: A sense of alienation from one's own life. A constant feeling of disappointment in the alternatives available, romantic or otherwise. The awkwardness of physical and emotional intimacy. A preoccupation with the minor faults of other human beings, which leads to an overall sense of ennui and minor misanthropy. The notion that everywhere you look, there's an inescapable drabness and sameness that will be with you until the day you die. But ultimately a sense of the inability to escape from one's own self.

These things are all good, so why is Anomalisa not a slam dunk for me like Kaufman's other films are?

Well for one, they aren't all slam dunks. I still get more out of this than I get out of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and its impact on me is probably comparable to that of Human Nature.

It can't be the overwhelming sense of melancholy the film instills in us, because that's present in other Kaufman films, some of which reach equally bleak conclusions.

I'm not sure I'm going to be able to answer this question. Sometimes different delivery methods of the same themes just don't work equally as well as one another. And in certain of Kaufman's films, particularly Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the director is adding a creative element that expands on what Kaufman is giving us with his writing.

That last should not logically be a problem for Anomalisa, where it should be said that Kaufman is actually the co-director. He collaborates here with Duke Johnson, a specialist in stop motion animation, who oversaw the stop motion in the Community episode done in that style, among others. Though I don't think I've seen any of Johnson's other work -- I can't actually remember if I saw the Community or not -- it appears as though Johnson's contributions here are only technical, while directors like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry also have their own creative energy and vision that adds a layer to what Kaufman is already bringing to the project. (Now I'm pretty much parroting a good friend's standard talking points on Kaufman and Jonze, which is that they need each other to bring out the best in the other.)

But I don't want to diminish the importance of stop motion to this film, and that will lead me to the first of my real comparison points with other Kaufman films. There's no doubt that Johnson brings an immeasurable amount to the project in that he can actually execute Kaufman's vision, which does require this form to be really achievable. The "gimmick," if you will, that Kaufman employs here is that everyone except the title character has the same face for our protagonist, Michael Stone -- essentially a revisiting of the most memorable scene in Being John Malkovich. While they obviously achieved that outcome in that movie by superimposing Malkovich's head on two dozen other bodies, that was just one scene that was played for broad comedy. I don't think you can execute that in live action over a whole movie without severely undermining the film's overall solemn tone. You can with stop motion though.

One particular use of this "gimmick" put me in mind of Human Nature, actually. During the overnight in which Lisa and Michael are sleeping in his Cincinnati hotel room, the camera looks out the window at the world outside as the sky goes from night to morning. We see on the right a billboard for the Cincinnati Zoo, which has a humorous slogan that calls back to Michael's conversation with the cab driver on the drive from the airport: "It's zoo-sized!" The picture is of a monkey with the same face as that worn by all the other people Michael sees, excluding Lisa but eventually starting to include her as well. Of course, Human Nature deals with what is essentially a monkey with the face of a man as its main character, and there are other times throughout his filmography Kaufman has returned to his preoccupation with animals.

I'll close by comparing the film to the one that would come next for him, which inspired this series but which I won't watch again to close it out for lack of remaining time slots on the calendar. Probably the most interesting scene for me is his breakfast with Lisa after their night together, moments after he has impulsively proposed running off with her to start a new life. He can't enjoy even a minute of exultation and confidence in this choice, as he is immediately drawn to the way Lisa clanks her teeth with the fork while she eats, and that bits of scrambled egg fall out of her mouth because she's talking while she's eating. The very next moment he accuses her of being controlling, so in the space of about 90 seconds she's acquired three significant demerits that he hadn't seen until that exact moment in time. It's just a reminder of Kaufman's essential world view that it is impossible for a person, specifically him, to trust even a fleeting sense of happiness, as it is always complicated by the realities and imperfections of life. Plus, a tendency to nitpick others' faults and use those as justification to end a relationship lays the groundwork for I'm Thinking of Ending Things, at the point where we are consuming the film on only its most literal level. In a way the outlook of Anomalisa is even more depressing, as Michael is seeing and being derailed by these things not at the end of a relationship, but at its very beginning -- which then also becomes its end.

I guess I won't close just yet because I shouldn't leave any discussion of Anomalisa without commenting on two more things.

One is the vocal work. David Thewlis makes a great perturbed Kaufman protagonist, aware of his need to function as a social being in society, as in the agonizing small talk with the cab driver, his involuntary participation hanging by a thread of strained politeness. Deep down the man loathes others as much as he loathes himself. Then you have Jennifer Jason Leigh so perfectly capturing the hesitations and insecurities of Lisa, a woman with crippling self-esteem issues who can only comprehend Michael's interests in her as a joke he's playing on her. Michael successfully breaking down that wall is really liberating for her, as it's a joy to watch this goofy yet cautious personality enjoy the simple pleasures of singing and pushing elevator buttons while beginning to trust the enthusiasm Michael shows for her. The most demanding role, though, belongs to Tom Noonan, who creates a handful of different personalities for the remaining characters in the movie he plays, all of them engaging, as this actor naturally always is. (Don't forget he's a returning cast member from Synecdoche, New York, the last of the Kaufman films I had yet to name check in this post.) Kaufman doesn't ask him to alter his voice significantly from role to role, which is part of the point -- he doesn't, for example, change the pitch of his voice when he plays female characters. But that doesn't mean there isn't nuance in the different roles he voices, and it's really impressive to see. 

I also wanted to touch on the hilarious dream sequence where Michael visits the basement of the hotel to speak to the manager on a "delicate matter." I love the little injection of absurdity in an otherwise straightforward movie, where Michael has to drive a golf cart to the other end of the basement in order to reach the man's desk, but also has to avoid a large pit in the middle of the floor, which he does not manage to do on his return. This scene also sort of reminds us of the "Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich" scene, as there is a pool of what appear to be secretaries who all tell Michael they love him, after the manager has started out by making this same declaration. This also culminates in Michael losing the part of his puppet's face that contains the nose and mouth, a sort of body horror that might be similar to Malkovich seeing his own head on all the other bodies.

Okay now I will really close with one exchange that I jotted down that I really liked, with the cab driver:

"Have you been to Cincinnati?"
"Yes, once before."
"Oh, it's changed since then."

Since when? Funny.

It also suggests a presumption that Cincinnati would have been disappointing to Michael on his previous visit, that this cab driver needs to talk up the city in his informal role as ambassador to newly arriving tourists. Little does he know that Michael is disappointed by every city he visits because he is disappointed with his life, and with himself.

It occurs to me that I have written more words for this discussion of Anomalisa than for any other single film in this series. Including these words that I'm typing right now, this piece is 1933 words long, exceeded only by the 2208 words I wrote for the double post including both Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine.

The conclusion, other than that it's appropriate to end the series with the longest piece, is that I actually do get a lot of Anomalisa, and maybe the more I think about it the more I will realize that it really is up there with Kaufman's other masterpieces. Or maybe even that I have grown to appreciate it more even just during the course of writing this post and exploring my thoughts in real time. Maybe it's that the Kaufman movies I love more unproblematically also leave me with a sort of comforting epiphany, even when they are bleak, and that this one doesn't.

That doesn't make it worse, though. It may just make it the most consummately Kaufman movie of all.

I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things: Synecdoche, New York

This is my penultimate edition of a 2021 bi-monthly series revisiting the films of Charlie Kaufman.

In the previous four instances of this series, I spent a lot of time talking about the ways the movie(s) I watched that month related to other movies written or directed by Charlie Kaufman.

This month, when taking notes, I found myself just writing down a lot of snippets of rich and meaningful dialogue. That's certainly an equally valid way of "thinking" about Kaufman.

I'll still do a little talking about how this film fits into Kaufman's body of work, but I may not concentrate on a bunch of superficial (yet still interesting) similarities between Synecdoche, New York and other Kaufman films. You could easily argue that Kaufman reveals himself most in the superficial details, but you could just as easily argue that nothing in a Kaufman movie is accurately described as "superficial," since he has clearly done so much thinking about every minute piece of the puzzle. 

The film it reminds me of most is, it probably goes without saying, Adaptation. Kaufman was literally a character in that film, and Caden Cotard, the main character in this film (played by the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman), is the character most clearly a direct analogue for Kaufman among his rich collection of characters. But the similarity presents itself most in a phenomenon I described in the opening sentence of my review of Adaptation for AllMovie nearly 20 years ago:

"Critics charged with the divine headache of describing Adaptation, in all its twisted magnificence, should find it appropriate that the story concentrates on the paralysis of writer's block, brought on by the impossible urge to say everything."

Synecdoche, New York is chock full of that impossible urge, and it is a divine headache indeed. If a 300-word review of Adaptation was insufficient to tackle its many complexities -- that was the word length I was writing back then, for the princely sum of $20 a pop -- then I have no idea what I would have done with a similar length allotment for Synecdoche. Fortunately, I didn't see that movie until after I stopped writing for AllMovie.

In fact, it was only just after I stopped writing -- like, one week later. That wasn't in 2008 when Synecdoche came out though. To give you some indication how different my movie viewing was back then, I didn't see this movie until Thanksgiving of 2011, November 21st to be exact. Only one week earlier, I had watched Sorry, Thanks, the last movie I ever reviewed for AllMovie. (I didn't stop out of choice; they changed their financial model to stop using freelancers.) 

The timing of my first viewing of Synecdoche, New York is interesting for a couple reasons. For one, it is absolutely unimaginable to me that I could have let three years elapse before getting around to watching it. Not with Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind both having claimed my #1 spot for their respective years. I lose that much trust in Kaufman just one film later, just because I don't really like how the trailer looks and some people say they didn't get it? What a fool I was.

But then there was the timing of what was going on in my life, and this is something that is only just occurring to me now. When I wrote that review of Sorry, Thanks, that was my last paying review gig -- to date. Six weeks from now, that will be ten years ago. Sure, I say I get paid, in a manner of speaking, for the reviews I currently write because I have a critics card that gets me into screenings for free ... when there isn't a pandemic on, anyway. But actually receiving direct compensation for the work that I consider my passion? Hasn't happened in ten years.

And I'm pretty sure I had that existential pit in my stomach when I watched Synecdoche just a week after filing my last review for AllMovie. I surely knew that the film criticism industry was changing, and that the chances of me getting paying work as a critic again were slim to none. So a movie that does a deep dive into the idea of your life passing you by, of measuring your accomplishments and the accomplishments you are still likely to make in the future, would have resonated with me quite a bit at the time. Even if I didn't consciously realize it until now.

But Synedoche, New York is about so much more than that. It might take me 10,000 words to talk about the things it's about. But hopefully you've already seen it, so you already know. 

So instead of doing the rigorous comparisons between movies to isolate similar themes -- you know, what's been the bread and butter of this series -- I'm just going to finish with the string of quotes/exchanges that I jotted down from Synecdoche, which in and of themselves reminded me of Kaufman's entire body of work. Even those that might require explanation, I will just leave to you to sort through. 

Forthwith:

"It's been a year."
"It's been a week!"

"The murky, cowardly depths of my fucked up being."

"It's about everything. Dating, birth, death, life, family. All of that."

"I'm fun."
"Oh sweetie no you're not."

"You wish you were a girl?"
"I think I would have been better at it."
"It's a drag in a lot of ways."

"I'm aching for it to be over. The end is built into the beginning."

"There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make. You destroy your life every time you choose. But you may not know it for 20 years. And you may not ever trace it to its source. And you only get once chance to play it out."

"No one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own."

"Everyone is disappointing, the more you know someone."

"This is everyone's experience, the details hardly matter. You are everyone."

"As you learn there is no one watching, and there never was."

"I know how to do the play now."

That's pretty much the last thing Caden says in the movie, though it's at least the third time he's said it. He's got his head on the shoulder of the actress who plays the mother in the dream of Ellen the cleaning woman, who as far as I can tell is a character Caden never even met. He either heard of her or just made her up. That's how deep the rabbit hole goes. 

After that, Dianne Wiest, the director in his earpiece, gives him a final stage direction that I only properly understood on this third viewing:

"Die."

Caden complies.

This series will die, so to speak, after one more installment in November, when I watch Anomalisa for only the second time.

I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things: Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine

This is the fourth in my bi-monthly 2021 series revisiting the films of Charlie Kaufman.

"... of the Spotless Mind." Yes, I know. I usually do include a movie's full title on first reference, especially in the subject of the post. But this allows me to get the whole post title on one line, so you'll just have to forgive me. Besides, who doesn't know what you're talking about when you say Eternal Sunshine?

So we go from a Dangerous Mind in May to a Spotless Mind in July. Did not even notice the parallel construction of those two titles until just a few minutes ago.

This is the only month in the series in which I am watching two films, which was necessary to fit all of Kaufman's movies (minus the one that inspired it, I'm Thinking of Ending Things) into a one-year bi-monthly structure. I chose these two to lump together because they are easily his films I've seen the most, as they were each my #1 film of their respective release years (2002 and 2004). I can be sure of five viewings of each now, three apiece since I started recording my rewatches back in 2006, and at least one apiece in the years between when they were released and 2006. If we just say it's five viewings for both, that'll make their pairing together this month seem even more predestined. 

I wasn't sure how much I'd have to say about Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, thinking that my familiarity with them would rob me of fresh insight. As it turned out, I ended up taking a decent number of notes for each.

The first thing I wanted to point out is how they relate to each other. I noticed both films begin with a neurotic voiceover from the main character, though Kaufman's voiceover as himself is a lot more self-effacing and contains a lot more self-loathing than the one he writes for Jim Carrey's Joel Barish in Eternal Sunshine. Both characters speak as though they are writing a journal, though only Joel actually is. They both talk about their personal tendencies, particularly their poisonous, self-defeating ones. Nicolas Cage's Kaufman concentrates in particular on his encroaching baldness and perceived fatness. Joel probably doesn't because he is neither bald nor fat.

A few scenes later, Joel says "Why do I fall in love with every woman who shows me the least bit of attention?" This could be a question every Kaufman character asks. 

Still, in a very real sense, Joel represents progress for the Kaufman stand-in. I couldn't help but notice that both of these films contain a scene where the Kaufman character is being asked inside by the woman he obviously likes when dropping her off after a date. The actual Kaufman in Adaptation turns down the offer by Cara Seymour's Amelia, despite her evident interest, as well as his own obvious interest in her. Moments later in his internal monologue, he says he's going to reverse that choice and go up to the door to kiss her. Instead he starts driving away. Joel initially rejects the offer of Kate Winslet's Clementine as well, but when she makes a second attempt, he relents. That's progress, but he still takes himself home before things have a chance to get really physical, citing the same thing Kaufman cites in Adaptation -- that he has to get up early the next day. But, this play works for Joel in the long run as he gets into a relationship with Clementine that is plenty physical.

Is this a real increase in Kaufman's optimism and self-esteem over a period of two years? It's hard to say. But if we are looking ahead to September's film, Synecdoche New York, it kind of looks like the answer is no. He actually has several romantic dalliances in that movie, including a marriage from before the story even begins, but Caden Cotard feels as repugnant in general to Kaufman as any of his characters. Let's not get too far ahead of ourselves though.

Both of these films also contain at least one character, and sometimes multiple characters, that Kaufman aspires to be, who emit a more effortless sense of cool and a far more easy sense of confidence. In Adaptation there are two such characters: 1) His brother Donald, also played by Cage, who is basically Charlie's exact opposite in every respect except for his appearance; 2) John LaRoche, played by Chris Cooper (in his Oscar-winning performance), who is brazen and rednecky while Kaufman is effete and intellectual and timid, though LaRoche is also extremely intelligent, making him even more of an aspirational figure for Charlie. 

That character is a bit harder to find in Eternal Sunshine, but I'd argue it is Mark Ruffalo's Stan. He's a bit of a Kaufman schlub but he's also a real cool dresser and is dating a real catch, Kirsten Dunst's Mary. He's like a Kaufman made good, maybe one step further than Joel. Then there's also a Kaufman gone bad, Elijah Wood's Patrick, who is like a Kaufman who gives in to his latent stalker tendencies. 

Although there's no other character to share Kaufman's neuroses in Adaptation, I'd argue there is one in Eternal Sunshine. Interestingly, that's Clementine herself, the original manic pixie dream girl (or one of them anyway), who also confesses to having found herself ugly as a child, and frequently talks about how fucked up she is. I think we'd see this a lot more easily if she were granted the internal monologue that Joel is granted, but only one of these per film is allowed. 

Speaking of the objects of Kaufman's interests, I noticed that he's got a particular type that represents sort of an ideal to him -- and it's not Clementine, much as she may intrigue him. Seymour actually seems to be the template for this, if we are again looking ahead to his future films. Physically, Seymour has a similarity of appearance to his love interest in Synecdoche, played by Emily Watson, and also to his love interest in Anomalisa, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh -- probably more like Watson as they are both British. I'd even say there is something similar about all these actresses to Patricia Arquette, who appears as a love interest in Human Nature. (Is Drew Barrymore from Confessions of a Dangerous Mind someone we should include in this group? I think probably that's a bridge too far.)

Some other isolated thoughts from my notes:

- In multiple projects we have seen that several characters in the film represent particular sides of Kaufman's personality, and that may have no more literal depiction than in Adaptation. Not only do we have Nicolas Cage playing both Kaufman and his brother, who have very different personalities, but we hear about this within the text of the film as well. Donald Kaufman's script "The Three" deals with a serial killer, a detective and the killer's next victim, who are all the same person. "Trick photography" is his explanation of how you accomplish the effect -- a sly commentary on the current film, in which trick photography is being used to film two Nicolas Cages in the same scene, who represent different sides of the same character's personality, just like the three characters in "The Three." We of course see this splitting of one character's personality revisited in all of Kaufman's films that come after this.

- In talking about the possible film version of the adaptation Charlie Kaufman is writing in Adaptation -- which includes himself and Donald, just as the movie we're watching does (it's all very self-reflexive) -- Donald says "I think I should play me." This is yet another demonstration of just how different Donald is than Charlie. The "real" Charlie does not play himself, casting Nicolas Cage instead. Though one assumes that if Donald actually existed, he would have cast himself rather than Cage -- and also that Kaufman must have, on some level, considered playing the role, if only he'd had a bit more chutzpah or if only he'd deluded himself a bit about his own abilities as an actor. Which is something Donald would have no problem doing, or actually, does without even realizing he's doing it, since Donald is the consummate under-thinker while Charlie is the consummate over-thinker. 

- I noticed the flashback scenes in Adaptation, where we see the early years of the earth as well as certain historical figures, felt more like something out of the Michel Gondry playbook than the Spike Jonze playbook. I'm wondering if Kaufman urged Jonze to film them this way after he worked together with Gondry on Human Nature -- even if he worked with Jonze first on Being John Malkovich. 

- Both of these films feature an interest in science -- in some cases weird science -- that we have seen in most of the Kaufman films to date. In Adaptation, it's this interest in orchids that was part of his original mission statement to adapt The Orchid Thief, though also in all these "creatures emerging from the primordial ooze" flashback sequences. In Eternal Sunshine, it's the very process used to erase the unwanted memories.

- I noted, not for the first time, that the music that plays over Joel and Clementine meeting each other on the train to Montauk is very goofy and whimsical. Clearly that is to a purpose, even though the tone that has been introduced in the few minutes before that is decidedly wintry and melancholy. I'm wondering if it is Kaufman's and Gondry's acknowledgement that this sort of meet cute scene has a history on screen, and is very tropy in nature. It kind of remind me of a sitcom, which speaks to some of what Kaufman is looking at in his Confessions of a Dangerous Mind script. 

- This isn't related to one of Kaufman's other projects, but I noticed a similarity between Eternal Sunshine and another film I love from this same period: Vanilla Sky. And it has to do with that same "uncontrollable slippage of time" concept that I find amply present in both Sky and in Synecdoche New York. When the sleeping Joel inside his own brain realizes he can't control the loss of his memories and that this is extremely distressing to him, he yells at the sky "I don't want to do this anymore, I want to call it off!" In the tone of voice and in the function within the narrative, it reminds me of Tom Cruise yelling "TECH SUPPORT!" in one of my favorite moments of Vanilla Sky. Both films are dealing with the artificial manipulation of memories to wipe out the memory of something painful that has happened to the main character. No wonder I love both of these movies so much.

- Lastly: Both Eternal Sunshine and I'm Thinking of Ending Things end on a shot in the snow, though the former is much more optimistic in its conclusion than the latter. 

One thing from watching these two films that I really did not expect: I enjoyed my revisit of Adaptation much more than my revisit of Eternal Sunshine. Though both are former #1 films for me, my working conventional wisdom was that I liked Eternal Sunshine better, as I ranked it higher both in my best of the 2000s rankings (#5 vs. #11) and currently on Flickchart (#38 vs. #56). However, on this viewing, I felt myself resisting Eternal Sunshine just a little, finding it a bit too twee for its own good in certain spots -- especially surprising since I don't think of Kaufman as this type of person. Adaptation clearly seems like the more mind-blowing achievement on a script level, even as clever as some of Kaufman's notions in Eternal Sunshine are. 

I'm starting to think that the things that are great about Eternal Sunshine are more equally attributable to Kaufman and Gondry, whereas Kaufman's involvement is more dominant in Adaptation, and maybe that I prefer Kaufman dominance. (Which is why two of the three films Kaufman himself directed resonated with me so much.) I'm wondering if part of that was confirmed when I watched a little featurette afterward on my Eternal Sunshine DVD, a conversation with Carrey and Gondry where we get to see some of Gondry's process and the things he was dreaming up on the fly. 

I suspect Eternal Sunshine may have spoken to me more than Adaptation initially, precisely because of its melancholy elements -- when I first saw the movie, I was recovering from a breakup and starting to recognize that we probably were not going to get back together. As I've grown older and have been in a happy marriage for 13 years, I'm probably a little less affected by the poignancy of a lost relationship and maybe in a better position to appreciate the pure cleverness of Adaptation. 

Okay, in September it's time for what could possibly overtake both of these as my favorite Kaufman: Synecdoche New York. It'll be my third viewing, so it hasn't yet had the repeat exposure to really challenge the other two. I could easily see that happening this time around though. 

I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

This is my third bi-monthly revisitation of the films of Charlie Kaufman in 2021.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is the Charlie Kaufman film I always forget about. I'm not sure if that's because I didn't think of it as a Kaufman film at the time, though I probably would have not yet fully developed my definition of a "Charlie Kaufman film" in 2002, so I suspect I sort of forget about it in retrospect. And it's easy to do so because I've never felt the desire to revisit it.

After a second viewing, I can say almost certainly that there will never be a third.

I don't dislike this movie, but it doesn't do a lot for me, to be honest. I remember being puzzled, back in 2002, about which parts of it were real and which parts were not. That wouldn't be a problem for me today, as I appreciate a lot more the creative license that might be taken with the lives of real people. I mean, this is a post Inglourious Basterds and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter world. But back then, it stuck in my craw and never dislodged.

I think I knew any material related to Chuck Barris being a spy was not real, as the whole idea for the movie came from Barris' autobiography, in which he claimed he had been a spy. (If he did work for the CIA, I seriously doubt it was in the form of assassinating people.) He later admitted it was made up, but then subsequent comments suggested a caginess about the whole thing, like if he had been a spy of course he would have had to say he hadn't been. Whatever. He wasn't.

But the parts I struggled with -- that's perhaps an exaggerated way to describe it -- were the events depicted on the game shows he was involved with, such as The Dating Game. There's a sequence in this film where contestants on the show give increasingly vulgar answers to questions, those that definitely would have violated censorship laws, and I remember that it troubled me, in 2002, to try to figure out if these things had actually happened. I now understand it as Kaufman's exaggeration of an underlying truth about the show -- that it fed people's more prurient natures -- and I "struggle" with it less now.

I think some of the things I don't love about Confessions are the things George Clooney brings to it as director. Although the period design is generally done well, Clooney tries to augment that with the use of various filters that I just find distracting. I also think the entire existence of Julia Roberts' character (and to a lesser extent, Clooney's own character) places this too much in an Ocean's Eleven world, a world that does not seem to speak particularly to Kaufman's sensibilities. We also know that Clooney has gotten significant influences from Joel and Ethan Coen, and while they have made some of my favorite films of all time, I don't think them particularly to be a match for Kaufman either. (Though it's closer.) I think specifically of the scene where Chuck's CIA compatriot strangles a cross country skier in Europe, and you can see the man's skis flailing about, sticking out of the back seat of the car, as he expires. That's such a Coen moment. 

But to say this film is absent the themes of Kaufman's work would be dead wrong. Again, they are all over the place here.

While Barris himself is not a close match for a typical Kaufman hero -- he's got a lot more confidence, for starters -- the way Sam Rockwell looks at certain points of this movie are Kaufman all over. At certain junctures he sports a kind of Kaufman afro that make him a dead ringer for the writer and future director. And since a lot of Kaufman's work involves fantasizing about being a different, more capable version of himself, Barris fits that description to a T. Barris' whole story is a fantasy that has come from a screenwriter's mind, even if that fantasy was inspired by a fantasy that came from Barris' own mind. (In my notes I also noted that Rockwell looked, at certain parts, a bit like Nicolas Cage -- which is appropriate since Cage plays Kaufman in July's film, Adaptation, which was released contemporaneously with Confessions.) It seems appropriate, though undoubtedly coincidental, that both Barris and Kaufman have the same first name, "Chuck" and "Charlie" both being nicknames for Charles.

Then the actual narrative structure is familiar from Kaufman's work, as it uses two strategies he used in Human Nature: a recurring interview format, as well as narration from at least one of the characters. Clooney chooses to make those interviews in a more explicitly documentary style format than they were in Human Nature, in part to lead us up to an actual "interview" with the real-world Barris at the end. 

Then there are some of the recognizable Kaufman thematic concerns, which are probably almost worth just bullet-pointing:

- There's a line of dialogue about Chuck being raised as a girl. As we saw in Being John Malkovich and will see later in I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Kaufman is interested in characters who cross the gender divide.

- Drew Barrymore's Penny tells Chuck of a dream she had where she was talking to an ape. Again, this seems to be bleeding through from Human Nature.

- Penny also gives Chuck a reason why he likes her, which is that she's "nothing like your mother." Chuck responds angrily to this and wonders where it was coming from. Again we see Kaufman grappling with mother issues. That character otherwise does not appear in the story, so it's out-of-nowhere reference is significant in terms of his obvious preoccupation.

- Then the coup de grace: "I hate myself," Chuck says at one point. "Goddamn do I hate myself."

In July I will watch both of Kaufman's next two films, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which are also his best two films. Since I've seen both at least four times, I figure I'll have less new to say about each, and can cram in them both, in order to keep us on track for Synecdoche, New York in September and Anomalisa in November to close the series. 

That time Paul Thomas Anderson made a Charlie Kaufman movie

Two thousand two was the rare year where there were two films released featuring the writing of the never-very-prolific Charlie Kaufman. As I am revisiting Kaufman's works for my bi-monthly series I'm Thinking About Kaufman Things, I'm just about to consider both of them. This month I'll be watching Confessions of a Dangerous Mind -- possibly as soon as tonight -- and Adaptation awaits me in July.

On Friday night, I revisited what easily could have been a third.

Paul Thomas Anderson is also not very prolific, sometimes making us wait a Kaufmanian five years between projects, and like Kaufman, he has established his own signature style. While the content of his films changes from outing to outing, he has a proclivity for epics painted on big canvases. These are as likely to have big casts (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) as smaller ones (There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread), but they have been without exception feasts for the eyes with long running times and a distinct sense of the grandiose.

Well, almost without exception.

The 96-minute Punch-Drunk Love, released in the aforementioned 2002, broke the mold Anderson had recently established with Boogie Nights and Magnolia. Or, you could characterize it as a return to the more intimate character drama he started out with, Hard Eight. But Punch-Drunk was quirky enough, especially next to the comparatively straightforward Hard Eight, that it clearly feels like its own distinct thing.

And kind of like a Kaufman thing, which I'm "thinking about" this year.

Adam Sandler's Barry Egan is a Kaufman protagonist if ever there was one. He's socially awkward almost to the point of pathology. He particularly doesn't know how to behave around women, despite growing up with seven sisters -- he doesn't know how to behave around women who are romantic prospects, anyway. In fact, except for the fact that this is a romantic fantasy, his behavior would certainly be interpreted by most women as that of a stalker, as he's flown to Hawaii just to meet up with Emily Watson's Lena Leonard -- even though they both live in the same city. His scheme to exploit the inefficiencies of a Healthy Choice frequent flier miles promotion is just the kind of obsessive task that would occupy a Kaufman protagonist, and most Kaufman protagonists have an anger bubbling beneath the surface, even if they don't act on it the way Barry does.

It's not just the oddball themes and design of Punch-Drunk Love that feel reminiscent of Kaufman, but also the casting choices -- even if only in retrospect. See, Kaufman worked with two of the stars of this movie, even if Anderson got to them first. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Emily Watson would both appear in Synecdoche, New York, still six years on the horizon at this point. Of course, this was already the fourth time Hoffman and Anderson had worked together. So should we say that maybe Kaufman made an Anderson movie with Synecdoche? Probably not, though we can leave these chicken-or-egg debates to the philosophers.

In regards to who imitated who, though, this does remind us of a criticism that dogged Anderson in his early days. Before Anderson's genius paved its way into a style that was not directly indebted to any other auteur, he was thought to be making homages to his favorite directors. It was easy to see Scorsese in Boogie Nights, Altman in Magnolia. PTA's fourth feature had always felt like something wholly original that was not in direct conversation with any other director's work, but now I'm starting to wonder.

However, in making these types of determinations, it is again important to remember the chronology here. When Punch-Drunk Love debuted at Cannes in May of 2002, there were only two Kaufman films in the world: Being John Malkovich and Human Nature. PDL is not a close thematic match to either of those films, so I think we can really only see this as a Kaufman-style film in retrospect. In fact, if PTA had continued in this vein rather than making There Will Be Blood, he and Kaufman might have ended up with equal claim to making "Charlie Kaufman films."

I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things: Human Nature

This is the second in my bi-monthly series revisiting the films of Charlie Kaufman.

I remembered so little of what happens in Human Nature (2001) that it was like discovering the existence of a Charlie Kaufman film I had never seen before. It all came back to me as I was watching -- or at least it felt familiar -- but if asked to tell you any of what happened going in, I would have been unable. And now that I've seen all the Kaufman films that followed, I can recognize that it's a film overflowing with his traditional concerns and themes.

But I should start by talking about another collaborator in the film, the director, Michel Gondry. 

I admit I forgot he was the director here, which challenges the notion that Spike Jonze was Kaufman's primary translator of his distinct vision of the world, at least before he started directing his scripts himself. Actually Gondry directed as many Kaufman films as Jonze did, two apiece. George Clooney is the only other person who has directed even one of Kaufman's scripts, and we'll get to that one in May.

I'm trying to think of the primary way Gondry's approach differs from Jonze's, and I can't, at least not in terms of Human Nature. The DIY aesthetic that would be introduced to some parts of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would bear fruit in later Gondry works, like The Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind, but he had not yet discovered his construction paper-inspired filmmaking style at this point.

But we're here to talk about Kaufman, not Gondry.

And Human Nature is a Kaufman movie through and through. It contains a line of dialogue, spoken by Tim Robbins, that may serve as a thesis statement for Kaufman's entire body of work: "I know how miserable it is to be alive."

Since this is undoubtedly Kaufman's least-seen work, I suppose a little plot synopsis would be helpful. The story revolves around not one but two Kaufmanian outsiders, or maybe even three depending on how you look at it. One is a child raised in the wild, thinking of himself as an ape, who is called Puff by the scientists who discover him. Another is a woman named Lila (Patricia Arquette) who is afflicted with hirsutism, meaning she has hair growing all over her body, which would (and does) make her a rather obvious companion for Puff. However, before she meets Puff she is matched up with Dr. Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins), a behavioral scientist who is trying to teach mice the correct dinner fork to use when eating their salad. Lila's friend and the woman administering her electrolysis (Rosie Perez) thinks he might not be particular about her condition (which she still keeps hidden from him) because of his small penis and because he's still a virgin at 35.

Upon discovering Puff in the wild, Bronfman takes it upon himself to reform the bestial creature into a gentleman of great refinement. In fact, the results are so successful that Puff litters his speech with 50 cent words and foreign phrases. Of course, remnants of the beast persist, like the fact that he still wants to hump any female that moves. A shock collar administered by Bronfman helps with that.

This has got Kaufman written all over it. In fact, it feels more similar to later Kaufman works even than the movie that kind of set our expectations for a Charlie Kaufman film, Being John Malkovich. It's got existentialism. It's got absurd comedy. (The shots of Puff being zapped across the room by the shock collar are acrobatic delights.) It's got love triangles. It's got eccentric science, which we first saw in Being John Malkovich and will continue to see in Eternal Sunshine. It's got awkwardness and neuroses and animal urges and the shame we feel over them.

One Kaufman trademark that I think really ties this film to I'm Thinking of Ending Things is what I referred to in my notes as "warped domesticity." Those scenes in Kaufman's latest where Jesse Plemons' character gets so triggered and agitated by his mother are presaged here. It's Bronfman here who has the twisted relationship with his mother (Mary Kay Place), who insisted he be punished if he used the wrong fork for his salad -- and led directly to his later work with mice. (A fact he denies in a handful of humorous exchanges with his therapist, played by Miguel Sandoval.) As far as I can tell, Place is the sole casting link between this and Malkovich, as she played the secretary who can't hear properly.

Kaufman's clear affinity for freaks is in ample quantity here, but the question really is, which character is the stand-in for the author? Bronfman seems like the obvious pick, as Kaufman has never been shy about self-deprecation -- I don't know if he was a virgin at 35 or has a small penis, but if he were he'd be unafraid of making that fact known to us. But his character is only the third most important in the narrative and the last of the main three introduced, and the character playing the Kaufman role is usually one of the two main leads. Certainly he would see himself in Lila and Puff also, Lila specifically, as her excess body hair is an outward manifestation of inward shame, the kind with which Kaufman is quite familiar.

In terms of the narrative itself, the film has a complicated structure that I also think of as a telltale sign of Kaufman's work. The story jumps around a bit, traveling into characters' pasts, without every being confusing, and shifts perspectives between the characters in a way that is also easy to follow. A shifting of perspective is often a narrative sin, a sign of bad writing rather than good writing, but Kaufman uses the tool as though the three main characters are all telling one chronicler -- maybe a documentarian -- the same story from their own viewpoints. It works exceedingly well.

I can't leave off discussing the film without noting that it had some interesting noir elements, or one in particular. (In addition to thinking of Kaufman things, I'm also thinking of noir things for my monthly series this year.) Miranda Otto is highly entertaining as Bronfman's assistant, a con artist who is pretending she's French (we don't realize until relatively late that she isn't) and is shamelessly throwing herself at Bronfman, despite the fact (or maybe specifically because of the fact) that he's already with Lila. She's a femme fatale, dressing the part in skimpy outfits and leading him down a path that leads to his own destruction. 

I can see I was not really ready for Human Nature when I first saw it, as the rating I gave it on Letterboxd (or at least, the rating I gave it retroactively when I started using Letterboxd ten years ago) was only three stars. My experience with it this time around would have been a full higher star than that. It gets at all the core Kaufman issues while also being a jolly good time.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind will be on the docket in May. 

I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things: Being John Malkovich

This is the first in my 2021 bi-monthly series revisiting the works of Charlie Kaufman.

I sometimes forget that Being John Malkovich is Charlie Kaufman's first produced screenplay. It's not like every introduction of a brazen new talent has to feel like a rough draft, something that gives a hint of the person's potential but has more flaws than home runs. But rarely do we see a first feature script come in as fully formed as this one.

In fact, for most of the time I've known about Kaufman, I thought his first film was Human Nature. We'll discuss that when I rewatch it in March, but that seems more like a typical first script, the one that comes in promising but misshapen. At the time I saw it, in 2003, it felt like that first work by an artist you go back and consume after he or she has broken out. The fact that I entirely missed it when it was released in theaters in 2001 gives a sense of its low profile relative to Malkovich, and explains why I persisted to think of it as his first until recently.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We're here to talk about Kaufman's actual first, which in many careers might still be his best, except that Kaufman keeps on getting better.

The fact that it was also Spike Jonze's first feature is further astonishing. As much as this is a writer's movie at its core, it benefits immeasurably from Jonze's eye behind the camera.

This was at least my third time watching Being John Malkovich, which includes the first time in the theater and a revisit in November of 2012. I suspect there could have been a second viewing between 1999 and 2006, but I didn't keep track of rewatches until 2006 so that's only speculation based on the likelihood that it wouldn't have taken me 13 years to return to this fascinating and confounding work. Especially since it was my #6 movie of 1999, a cinematic year I continue to think of as one of the best of my lifetime.

In this series I said I wanted to discuss how each film relates in some way to I'm Thinking of Ending Things, but if I keep my focus that narrow, it may be a bit limiting -- especially since I've given my #1 of 2020 a lot of love on this site recently, if not actual in-depth discussions. What I really meant that I'd be doing is having a general discussion of the themes Kaufman has continued to revisit, which have culminated in his most recent masterwork. We'll find our way there and I think it should be interesting.

If you go nine years without seeing a movie, its details have a chance to get a bit fuzzy, so there were a number of surprises to me on this rewatch. One was how much there is about transgender issues, which -- in one of a few signs of the era in which it was created -- Cameron Diaz' Lotte refer to as being a "transsexual." I can't remember when that word went out of date, but we haven't been using it for some time now. Also retired: Characters who label other characters "fags." One of the abrasive elements of Catherine Keener's great Maxine is that she asks John Cusack's Craig if he is a "fag" because he does not treat her as a sexual object. Though of course as with anything with her, it's mostly done for trolling purposes. (We wouldn't have known what a troll was back then either.)

But back to the transgender stuff. It reminded me how Kaufman once wanted to make a movie called Frank or Francis, whose plot details were not really known, but it was highly suspected to relate to issues of gender identity, as the title might suggest. Er, wait a minute -- I just realized that I always read that title as Frank or Frances, which would suggest a person with gender uncertainty issues, while Frank or Francis would just be two different variations of the same male name. I guess I will leave this paragraph in even though it now makes no sense. Anyway, I always had it in my head that Kaufman was interested in gender non-conformity and I always thought Frank or Francis [sic] might be his modern version of Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda. I better move on.

Still, I think Kaufman explores in other films the gender divide that Lotte wants to cross here. It's of course present in I'm Thinking of Ending Things, where it is highly assumed by the end that a man (the elderly janitor) has assumed the subjectivity of a woman (the character played by Jessie Buckley), even though the truer version of himself also appears in that car (the character played by Jesse Plemons). It's all over the place in Malkovich, as Lotte talks about the portal into Malkovich's brain being kind of like his vagina. There's also of course the "Malkovich Malkovich?" scene with all the female Malkoviches, including the first one with the very ample bosom. 

One constant in Kaufman films is the actual surrogate for himself, a depressed schlub who has no self esteem and nothing to offer anybody, or so he thinks. I found it interesting to note that even in its very first on-screen incarnation, this character is viewed by Kaufman as despicable and incapable of redemption. Cusack's Craig is really difficult for the audience to cheer on, only approaching that on a couple occasions by sheer dint of his timidity. But Craig is more monstrous than pitiable -- he labels himself a monster at one point, and tries for that redemption by saying he doesn't want to be a monster. But in this very moment, he proves his own monstrosity but locking Lotte back in the cage and duct-taping her mouth when he reverts to his jealousy over her connection to Maxine.

Craig's puppetry is the first appearance of Kaufman's career-long interest in metaphors for filmmaking, which have their more literal incarnations (Adaptation) as well as more abstract incarnations (Synecdoche, New York). I was disappointed in a line of dialogue that put too fine a point on a connection we were surely making for ourselves, the connection between Craig's career dreams and what he's actually doing in Malkovich's body. Near the mid-point he tells Lotte "It's just a matter of time before Malkovich is just another puppet hanging next to my workbench." Over time Kaufman would come to trust us to make these associations ourselves. 

The other big connection I wanted to make to Kaufman's other films was the first appearance of characters traveling through an environment that exists only mentally, when we see Lotte chase Maxine through Malkovich's subconscious. It's essentially this same set piece that occurs throughout Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as Joel and Clementine wade through Joel's memories. And this could really be the entirety of I'm Thinking of Ending Things.

There's probably a lot more I could write about this movie when comparing it to other Kaufman works, but it occurs to me that I don't want to steal the thunder of those discussions when they happen later on. So I'll just end with some individual moments I loved and wanted to call attention to.

- The bit where Malkovich emerges from the portal next to the New Jersey Turnpike, and moments later someone throws a crumpled up soda can that hits him in the back of the head, saying "Hey, Malkovich, think fast!" I love the idea that a motorist driving by at a high speed in the dark a) can identify that this as Malkovich, b) thinks nothing of the fact that he's walking by the side of the highway, and b) decides quickly enough that he's got some beef with the actor that warrants throwing an object at him.

- Moments later, when Malkovich tells Craig he'll see him in court. As if this situation might be properly adjudicated in a court of law or has anything to do with normal jurisprudence.

- The Mary Kay Place speech impediment bit, and how Orson Bean persists in the notion that it's his own problem rather than hers. Incidentally, this is the third time I've seen Place in a movie in the past month, after she appeared in both Music and The Prom.

- Anything related to Charlie Sheen.

- The film's commentary on how dumb men are when it comes to romance and sex. Lotte and Maxine make plans to meet in Malkovich because Maxine basically knows without any question that she can find him and lure him into the bedroom based on nothing more than her own will to do it. 

- The scene of the monkey flashing back to his own capture. Perfectly random and wonderful.

- The puppetry stuff is amazing and beautiful. I found myself wondering if this is actual puppetry that a real puppeteer could manage by orchestrating a precise order of string movements, or whether it is intentionally outside the bounds of reality, and if so, what commentary Kaufman might be making with that.

- Octavia Spencer is in this! She is credited as Octavia L. Spencer.

- I love the backstory of why there was a half-story built into the Mertin-Flemmer building. In the hilarious and grainy video recreation of the story, the old sea captain (I can't remember whether it's Mertin or Flemmer) says, as he's falling in love with the little person woman who inspired this unique bit of architecture, he wants to create a place "for you and all your accursed kind." I laughed out loud, I think just because of the disconnect between loving someone and referring to their kind as "accursed."

- The number of times I laughed out loud during the movie, in general. Every movie Kaufman has written is loosely described as a "comedy," but in my mind I don't think of his movies as being funny in that way -- though I did laugh a number of times in I'm Thinking of Ending Things as well, one of his most consciously dire films.

- As I was watching I noted a similarity between this and Get Out in terms of its idea of one soul hijacking another and fighting for control of the body. I'm not the first one to make that comparison. I found out afterward that a whole fan theory has been put forward that suggests that Get Out is a spiritual sequel to Being John Malkovich, especially since Catherine Keener appears in both films -- the idea is that her character in Jordan Peele's film could actually be Maxine after learning to control this process of body swapping. Peele has given his endorsement to the theory -- after the fact, not claiming it was in his mind when he made Get Out, though he is on record as being a huge fan of Jonze and Kaufman's film. 

Okay that's probably enough for now. Back in March with Human Nature. 

I'm thinking of Kaufman and Welles

For about the past five years I've done both a monthly viewing series on this blog and a bi-monthly viewing series, which have both reset at the beginning of each new calendar year.

Twenty twenty-one is an expansion forward in that regard, as I'm not going to get six months out of the year to rest comparatively easily. 

That's right, I could not decide between two different bi-monthly series for 2021, so I decided to do both of them, intertwined. One will consist entirely of repeat viewings, while the other will be my first time seeing the film in question.

The first will start this month and is called I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things, a riff on my #1 movie of last year. Charlie Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things struck me as a kind of culmination of all the films he'd written or directed before it, though to be fair, you could probably say that about each of his films. Also "culmination" is not the correct term, since he's only 62 and could have another couple decades of films in him.

But given how many themes contained in I'm Thinking of Ending Things have appeared first in other Kaufman works, I thought it would be a good time to go back and revisit those other works, all of which I've seen, in chronological order.

It'd work out great if Kaufman had exactly six films before now, but that's not the case. Between his work as a screenwriter and his work as a director, he's got eight total films to his credit.

So here's how I've decided to handle it. I won't watch I'm Thinking of Ending Things again at the end of 2021, as I saw it twice last year and it's still fresh in my memory, so that cuts out one movie. And the two of his films I'm most familiar with -- which were also my favorite films of their respective years, just like Ending Things -- also happen to have been consecutive works in his filmography, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. So I'll squeeze those two into the same month at the midpoint, leaving myself with the following schedule:

January - Being John Malkovich (1999)
March - Human Nature (2001)
May - Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)
July - Adaptation (2002)/Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
September - Synecdoche, New York (2008)
November - Anomalisa (2015)

The sticklers among you will note that Confessions of a Dangerous Mind technically came out about three weeks after Adaptation, so I can't really call Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine consecutive releases. But the fact that there were two Kaufman movies in December of 2002, when he has only eight total movies in the past 22 years, is an oddity to begin with, so I think it'll be okay. (In fact, when I first envisioned this series, I had forgotten he even wrote Confessions. It made me grumpy when I realized that as it meant I had to combine the other two movies into one month.)

The symmetry of the series does work out pretty well otherwise, though, as half of the months will be movies I've seen only once (Nature, Confessions and Anomalisa) while the others will be movies I've seen at least twice, and more than four times in the case of my July movies.

In each post I'll try to reflect on how the movies relate to each other, and to I'm Thinking of Ending Things in particular.  

The other half of the year -- the months in which I usually do my bi-monthly series, starting with February -- will relate to another great director who was in our minds last year, and who would have directed a #1 film of the year for me if I'd been around back in 1941. That of course is Orson Welles, whose greatest film was the subject of the movie Mank last year, though Welles himself played only a bit part.

It was actually well before I saw Mank that I was thinking one day about how much I like Welles, if not always every movie he made, then at least the idea of him. And then I got to thinking about how I still had not seen his final, uncompleted movie, The Other Side of the Wind, which was released to Netflix in 2018.

At the time, I decided against seeing it that year in order to resolve the problem of how to rank it, as a "new release" in 2018 or just a relic that had been dug up and finished. I wrote about that dilemma here. I figured I would get to it pretty soon in 2019, but that whole year and the next both passed without me doing so. By the time this occurred to me near the end of 2020, the movie was almost totally off my radar.

So I decided to reverse engineer a series leading up to the watching of The Other Side of the Wind, which would have the added benefit of making me an Orson Welles completist.

Because you know how I like my clever series titles, this one will be called All's Well That Ends Welles. The purpose will be to "end Welles," in other words, to see the remaining films of his I haven't seen.

As with I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things, though, the numbers don't work out perfectly. There are more than six Welles films I have not seen. I tried to whittle down that number with a 2020 viewing of his version of Don Quixote, also an uncompleted patchwork that was finished in 1992. I had already watched The Stranger a month or two before that. But I didn't whittle any further than that, leaving me with the following titles still to watch:

Journey Into Fear (1943)
The Lady From Shanghai (1947)
Macbeth (1948)
Mr. Arkadin (1955)
The Trial (1962)
Chimes at Midnight (1965)
The Immortal Story (1968)
F for Fake (1973)
The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

The series is a bit problematically conceived, because I am actually closer to the beginning of Welles' filmography than I am to the end of it. Plus, it's unclear how many of these things are actually really considered feature films, and how many will even be accessible to me. Then there's also the fact that I kind of want to watch a movie I've already seen, The Magnificent Ambersons, a second time, to get a proper grasp on my feelings toward it.

But if Welles wanted to have a messy career full of fits and starts and incomplete projects, I don't know why a bi-monthly series devoted to him should be any less messy. In six installments spaced about every 60 days, I will reach my own idea of what constitutes "ending Welles" by the time 2021 is done.

Although I didn't plan this, I think Kaufman and Welles actually have a fair bit in common. They are both exceedingly ambitious in the scope and themes of their projects, and are both fascinated with existentialism, insofar as it affects the psyche of men. I would not say their films are made to the exclusion of women, but their perspectives on and relationship to women are things I'm sure I'll grapple with -- things I'll be thinking of, if you will -- as I visit and revisit their work over the coming 12 months. 

So I may have bitten off more than I usually chew, but I think it will make for good chewing. 

Come have a bite with me, if you like.