Charlie Kaufman's latest weirdfest is from the point of view of a young woman going with her boyfriend to visit his parents. Almost the entire first half hour of the movie is them talking in the car. Seriously. They talk about art, she recites a poem, she muses to herself. It captures the weird tensions and bumpy flow of a strained relationship, but my God, it's like 25 minutes of that!
But I kept going, because there was something weird and intriguing about it all. And when they reach the parents, it gets way weirder. Events are surreal and everything in the house keeps ... changing in weird and unexpected ways.
Periodically we see an old guy at work. No explanation.
While it's all very strange, there is an emotional throughline in that it captures the weird discomfort of parents and dealing with people's baggage. It is a Kafka-esque relationship.
None of it seems to make sense, and the movie gets truly lunatic by the end. I had some vague ideas, but nothing close to an understanding of what was supposed to have happened. Still, I had generally enjoyed it and there were amazing moments.
Then I read the wikipedia plot summary for the novel this is based on, and that was helpful in understanding what had happened. And then I found a great Vanity Fair article that cleared up a lot more questions.
This is probably one of these movies you should watch twice if you want to figure it out for yourself. There really are clues that in retrospect gives some suggestion of what's going on. And if you know what's going on, it would be a different movie in a lot of ways.
Once I understood what I'd seen I could appreciate all the different levels this movie was dealing with in parallel.
My girlfriend didn't like the movie but couldn't stop talking about and analyzing it. It's definitely the kind of movie you need to talk about after.
Kaufman is uncompromising in his vision, which is why I suspect he'll never make anything as enjoyable as the movies that he scripted but didn't direct. But overall I'd recommend watching this, especially if you like or don't mind a lot of weirdness.
