Boy oh boy do I have a collection of films for you today. With our house’s reliable contributor of genuinely bad suggestions on vacation (sorry Neil, but it’s true), we experienced a week of all-thriller-no-filler, storming through unimpeachable classics and a variety of great new features alike. We cleared out a couple of 2021’s top outstanding features, leaned back to snag Kaufman’s latest film, and also spent some time with that irrepressible showman, Orson Welles. It all made for a weighty, criticism-ready pile of cinema, and I feel like my thoughts are going to start tumbling out of my head if I don’t get to them immediately, so I’m just gonna quit with this labored introduction and get to the good stuff. Let’s run down the Week in Review!

Our first stop this week was Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, based on the book by Iain Reid. In spite of being an adaptation rather than an original script, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is steeped in precisely the same self-conscious, cerebral voice that marks all of Kaufman’s scripts. The opening sequence sets the tone: as a young woman (Jessie Buckley) is driven out to meet her boyfriend (Jesse Plemons)’s rural parents, her internal monologue circles and re-circles her determination to end this relationship. Her thoughts flit lightly across a dozen subjects, but every time Plemons asks her what she’s thinking about, she replies that she’s just watching the snow. Already there is an impassable barrier between the two, a note of disconnection between her fatalism and his desperation to please; as the film continues, that nagging disconnection will grow into a full splintering of reality, as we learn the true nature of their doomed relationship.

Along with that anxious, well-read authorial voice, I’m Thinking of Ending Things also continues Kaufman’s regular interrogations of how fiction and identity converge, with plenty of the meta-narrative intrigue he’s previously explored in films like Adaptation or Being John Malkovich. The middle stretch of the film sees Plemons’ character seemingly attempting to rewrite his own family history, with his parents’ ages and demeanor shifting rapidly and without warning throughout their dinner engagement. Mysterious calls come from impossible sources, events are referenced that never could have happened, and Buckley’s name changes several times, in keeping with Plemons’ attempts to assert her presence at some point in his life timeline. It’s a psychological panic from both ends, with Buckley desperate to assert her personhood, and Plemons desperate to justify his life’s trajectory.

The ultimate revelation of this story’s true nature makes for a graceful segue from psychological horror to sorrowful reminiscence (and I’m going to talk about it now, so jump to the next blurb if you don’t want to hear about it). It eventually becomes clear that Buckley is an amalgam of several women Plemons knew, or perhaps a woman he wished he knew, or had said the right thing to at the right time in order to fix everything. Her habits and passions are a mélange of his boyhood hopes and adult disappointments; her paintings are ripped from his basement walls, her poetry from his bedroom volumes, and her profession – well, that doesn’t really impact his identity, so it remains variable.

But the tragedy is, Plemons’ very image of his own “perfect woman” is actually too perfect for him; he can imagine this woman dating him, but he can’t imagine her staying with him. And their conversations reflect this tension at all times, with his every statement possessing that mincing, deferential agony of knowing you’re the second-smartest intellectual in the room. At one point, Buckley opens her mouth and Pauline Kael’s voice comes out, eviscerating him for his simple-minded appreciation of Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence. Plemons can find no relief from his disappointments or inadequacy, even in his own fantasies; he seeks desperately to dazzle Buckley into staying with him, but neither his limping attempts at critical discourse nor his perpetual shuffling of his own narrative offer her a convincing role in his life.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is cerebral and self-critical and sorrowful in all the ways Kaufman does best, and its leads each evoke a desperate spark of humanity in spite of the film’s high-concept structure. Up until the climax, it feels primarily self-conscious and sad, boasting some uniquely effective horror-adjacent setpieces, and digging in the knife through Kaufman’s reliably well-observed thoughts on aging, human relations, and intellectual inadequacy. But like all of Kaufman’s great works, that climax elevates a harrowing therapy session into a resoundingly life-affirming declaration, as Plemons at last lets go of Buckley, and through doing so forgives himself for a lifetime of disappointments. It’s a cold world out there, and Kaufman’s anxious, narrative-infatuated perspective on it has resonated with me ever since Eternal Sunshine first blew my mind. I’m glad to see he’s still as sharp as ever, and still holds a fragment of hope for us.

We then swerved from the cutting edge of cinematic navel-gazing back to one of its most esteemed maestros, screening Orson Welles’ remarkable Citizen Kane. Kane’s lofty status as the oft-cited “greatest film of all time” might lend the impression that it’s a particularly challenging watch, but if you can appreciate cinematography to any degree, you will be absolutely dazzled by Welles’ masterpiece.

Kane’s narrative is relatively simple. Upon the event of infamous newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane’s death, a reporter is tasked with finding the “story behind the story,” revealing the true nature of this larger-than-life American, and perhaps discovering the meaning behind his dying word, “rosebud.” The reporter’s quest leads him to interview all of Kane’s closest companions, facilitating a narrative structure with much the same structural elegance as something like Rashomon, if everyone in Rashomon largely agreed on the finer details. Everyone the reporter interviews ultimately knew the same Kane: temperamental, inquisitive, and utterly self-confident, their words only darken the void at the core of his identity.

Citizen Kane’s screenplay is ambitious yet delicate, gracefully laying gossamer strands of insight across a complex web of interwoven personal stories. The performances are also uniformly excellent; Welles essentially took his whole theater troupe with him when he jumped from New York to Hollywood, and their easy mutual confidence elevates all of Kane’s poisoned relationships. But it is undoubtedly the cinematography and general mise-en-scène which elevates Citizen Kane from simply a great movie to the great movie, a blueprint of visual elegance and contrast which still seems revelatory all these years later.

Every single shot is composed with the careful thought of a painted masterpiece, with Welles employing black and white photography to as beautiful an effect as any cinematographer in history. Every shot likewise embodies a depth of perspective that was revelatory at the time, and now “only” seems like the work of an Ozu-tier framing savant. You could take almost any still image from Kane and use it to teach a class on how depth creates both emotional investment and visual drama, or how to tell a narrative through the positioning of objects, or how light and perspective can draw the eye towards an intended goal. Of course, Kane is not a series of still images; it is cinema, and Welles seems as determined as any artist to evoke the beauty of traditional art through each movement in the frame, and each contrast of transition or montage. The opening sequence alone feels like a morphing tapestry, with our introduction to Kane’s hubristic legacy evoking terror and awe purely through the aesthetic synchronicity between each new image and its temporal neighbors. As I said, if you love cinematography, you will love Citizen Kane.

After that, we checked out Wes Anderson’s latest feature, The French Dispatch. Bill Murray stars as the eccentric proprietor of “the French foreign bureau of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Star,” an improbable periodical that’s essentially The New Yorker topped with three generous shakes of Andersonian whimsy. Murray’s will specifies that the French Dispatch will cease publication on the event of his death, and so this film invites us to enjoy its final issue in cinematic form, complete with some light color, three feature articles, and the closing obituaries.

Anderson himself has stated that this film is a love letter to journalists, though to be precise, it’s more specifically a love letter to the winding, character-rich investigations that exemplify journalism’s highest aesthetic peaks. Each of the film’s episodes are stories about art and identity in some way, and each of them also serve as character studies for both their subjects and authors. Anderson’s shifts in presentation make this alchemy of perspective impossible to ignore; though each of these pieces was written for the Dispatch, they are presented in their authors’ own chosen formats. Tilda Swinton puts on a grand symposium to her misunderstood artist, Jeffrey Wright (a phenomenal addition to Anderson’s stable of actors) treats himself to a tell-all investigative special, and Frances McDormand (ditto) cannot help but situate herself in the drama, disenchanted as she is with the idea of “journalistic neutrality.”

Each of the Dispatch’s stories are quirky and sentimental and blessed with magnificently ornate set design, as you’d expect from any Anderson film. Each of its performances are tightly controlled and quietly neurotic, evoking that particular winking fatalism that seems to come with literate investigative journalism. Anderson constructs films like watchmakers construct watches, frequently resulting in a sense of ironic emotional distance, but his unabashed love of this film’s chosen profession nonetheless infuses it with a palpable sense of authorial passion. It’s clear he can relate to the failed impartiality of the great journalist; the Dispatch’s correspondents similarly attempt to cloak their passion in rhetoric, but cannot help falling in love with their subjects almost as much as they love the written word. As a bleary-eyed tribute to a dying art form, The French Dispatch ultimately cannot maintain the dry distance Anderson likes to keep from his subjects, and is stronger for it. The age of literacy may be ending, but it is still remembered.

Finally, we also checked out Hosoda’s latest Belle, as he returned to the investigations of digital realities he previously explored in Our War Game and Summer Wars. By title alone, you can to some degree grasp Hosoda’s shift in perspective as he returns to this favorite subject. While those previous films reflected on how conflict is newly expressed through digital spaces, Belle is more interested in the internet purely as a safe harbor for personal identity.

Belle centers on a girl named Suzu, whose mother dies when she is young, sacrificing her life to save another girl from a flood. Feeling abandoned by her mother and generally out of place in the world, Suzu suffers through an unhappy adolescence, until her friend introduces her to the virtual world “US.” Taking on the form of her popular classmate, Suzu discovers the trauma that silenced her love of song is no barrier here, and that in the form of “Belle,” she can sing like a child once again. And Suzu does more than sing – as Belle, she becomes the greatest diva the metaverse has ever known, and eventually finds herself caught in a digital manhunt for the mysterious “Beast.”

Belle retrofits bits and pieces of the Beauty and the Beast narrative to suit its own needs, hinging on the central metaphor of how easy it is for anyone to become the Beauty or the Beast in the internet’s eyes. While the film’s focus on doxxing as the ultimate threat feels a little outdated, its characterization of online culture’s savagery and inconstancy are on point, effectively illustrating the danger that comes with offering any real part of yourself to the internet. Of course, Suzu is only able to move past her trauma at all when she assumes a new identity; as a result, the internet is presented as it truly is, a vehicle capable of encouraging reinvention and self-actualization just as easily as it facilitates mass-scale abuse.

Hosoda’s understanding of the internet’s contradictions seems more mature at this point, and so too seems his light touch with personal drama. Suzu’s feelings are expressed not through bold speeches, but through the cold beauty of the world around her, and the perpetual presence of the river that stole her happiness. Meanwhile, the digital world promises freedom purely through its sprawling, fantastical cityscapes; rather than relying on the inherently limited CG character models for expression, it is their relationship with the colorful compositions around them that relays their deepest feelings.

In this disorienting conflagration of real-world melancholy and digital infamy, Hosoda prays we can find community without cruelty, that the anonymity of the internet can be a shield for those who need it, yet not let us forget the human behind the screen. Otherwise sympathetic characters revel in the gamified satisfaction of “unmasking villains,” demonstrating the ease with which we can make amoral sport out of immoral cruelty. Every online victory is precipitated by a rush of “fuck you” and “hate her” and “why’s she trying so hard?”, with even evidence of domestic abuse providing fodder for gleeful trolls. The metaverse provides Suzu with a literal and metaphorical voice, yet it is only through abandoning her new finery that she can connect with one solitary soul in need. For all that she accomplishes online, her ultimate reward is that she no longer needs Belle, having learned Suzu is more than good enough.

Ultimately, Suzu’s journey comes full circle when she relinquishes her new identity, and sings to the assembled masses in her own form and voice. In that moment, she finally understands her mother’s choice – because she is standing in the same spot, knowing she is the one and only person who can save a lonely, desperate soul. Humanity was not built to perform for all the world, and when we make gods of our fellow human beings, we are only setting up more victims for a terrible fall. But even if we were not meant to sing for everyone, the internet would still be valuable, if only to let us sing for the one person who truly needs us.