The Genius of Charlie Kaufman

September 4, 2020

The last few weeks, we’ve been exploring the works of some of our more well-known filmmakers (Spielberg, Scorsese, Cameron, Soderbergh), but this week we’re going to dive into the filmography of a writer-director whose work might be lesser known, but is one of the more creative minds making movies today.  Charlie Kaufman has been in the film business for over twenty years, but doesn’t have a long list to his credit.  He started as a writer on many of his projects, while expanding to directing for his last few films.  His new film, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, premieres on Netflix on September 4^th, so the time is right to explore his work.

To call his films unconventional would be an understatement.  When you go into the experience of watching his movies, there may be times you say “This movie is weird.  What is going on here?”, but I have found it best to tell myself “Just go with it.”  He has a habit of not just taking a right turn while writing a script, but going off the page and out in a completely different direction.  He is not afraid to take bold chances in his storytelling and imagery, which can include many layers of meaning.  Ahead of his new film, I recently revisited his three masterpiece films and watched a few of his other works to get the full Kaufman experience.  A common theme across all of his films is someone (usually a man in his late 30s – early 40s) going through an existential life crisis.  He’s been known to bring his own neurosis into his screenplays (literally, in one case) to explore the messiness of life’s problems. 

Like some of the best filmmakers, you get an appreciation of Kaufman’s work through multiple viewings.  A film may take on different meanings to you depending on where you are in your own life journey when you watch it.  And with many layers to his storytelling, you often notice new aspects to a film that you missed on previous viewings, including small clues early in the film that foreshadow plot points that come up later.  Sean Fennessey, the host of my favorite movie podcast, The Big Picture, made this comment about his new film:  “I’m Thinking of Ending Things, like all Charlie Kaufman projects demands and rewards multiple viewings.  I loved it for constantly unnerving expectations.  It isn’t a puzzle box, it’s 1,000 puzzle pieces scattered on a puzzle-colored floor.  Highly recommend.”  It’s described as a psychological horror film (which would be a new genre for Kaufman) and features strong lead actors in Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons.  I can’t say that I will like it for sure, but I’m looking forward to watching it.  Let’s look back at some of his earlier work.

Skip It – Human Nature (2001)

Wait a minute, I thought you said he was a genius filmmaker and you’re starting out by telling me to skip a film?  We’re going to start at the bottom and work our way up and quite frankly, this film is not good, despite Tim Robbins and Patricia Arquette in the lead roles.  Kaufman wrote this screenplay and was able to get it made based on the success of his first credit as a screenwriter (which we will get to).  I won’t waste your time with this plot and can only think of one good thing to say about this movie.  Steven Soderbergh was originally attached to direct this film, but dropped out when he was offered the opportunity to direct Out of Sight, the great crime comedy with George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez.  So, do yourself a favor – skip Human Nature and go watch Out of Sight.

Interesting Concept But Not For Me – Anomalisa (2015)

I’ve often written about admiring directors who take risks and while I respect the effort that Kaufman took with this film, it just didn’t resonate with me.  He wrote and directed this story of a middle aged man on a business trip who meets a woman at a hotel and starts to believe she may be his soulmate and he should spend the rest of his life with her.  Here’s the kicker to this film – it’s a stop-motion animated film with characters that look like puppets.  As with most of his films, Kaufman makes an unusual directing choice – this time, in order to emphasize the main characters boredom with his life, all the characters look the same and are voiced by the same actor, so they all sound alike.  It’s a not-so-subtle way to show us that the main character’s life is so desperate that everything doesn’t just feel the same, it literally looks and sounds the same.  The woman he meets looks and sounds different, which brings him the happiness that he was missing.  Interesting concept, the story just didn’t do enough for me.

The Non-Kaufman Kaufman Film – Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)

What do I mean by this description?  While he is credited as the screenwriter for this film, his original script went through a lot of rework by the director (who you may have heard of), without any involvement from Kaufman, so it doesn’t really feel like his other films.  Known best for being the directorial debut of George Clooney and for making Sam Rockwell into a well-known actor, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind tells the story of Chuck Barris, the host of the 1970s game show The Gong Show, and creator of The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game.  Oh, and he also claimed to have been an assassin for the CIA while he was doing all of that game show work.  This movie is OK, it’s very uneven, and definitely feels like a director’s first effort – heavy on scenery and shots, light on story.  Clooney’s next effort Good Night, and Good Luck was much better.  I do wonder how the original screenplay for Confessions would have played out on film if it hadn’t been altered. 

This May Make Your Hair Hurt – Synecdoche, New York (2008)

My former boss used to have a saying when we were dealing with a very complex issue or one that just frustrated the hell out of you while you were trying to solve it – He’d say, “This will make your hair hurt.”  I always liked that one.  I had always heard great reviews about this film (Kaufman’s first as director) and knew very little about it before I watched it.  Sometimes when I watch a film, I may get a little lost in the plot (if it’s confusing or I get distracted) so I’ll jump on the Wikipedia page for the movie and cheat a little (“Oh, that’s who that character is”).  After watching Synecdoche, New York, I needed a little more – the Wikipedia page didn’t explain enough to me about what the heck I just watched.  I mean, I kind of got it, but figured a lot of it went right over my head.  Let’s come back to that. 

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a New York play director who is obsessed with his own mortality, convinced that he is dying from any number of non-existent ailments.  All the while, his marriage to an artist is falling apart and he continues to spiral into a deep, depressive funk.  While he is at his lowest, he is awarded a large MacArthur Fellowship, which gives him the financial opportunity to pursue something big for his next project.  He decides to tell the story of his own life in a large warehouse, where he creates life-size replicas of buildings and the set pieces of his world.  As the months and years move on, he can never finish his play, constantly adding scenes and characters, sometimes inserting moments from his life into the play, shortly after they’ve occurred.  His “play” and his “life” become intertwined, as people and characters become one and the same.  It’s clear he will never finish his play as you see him tell people over and over again that he thinks he has settled on a name for it, but he’s not sure.  The whole film is Kaufman’s way of telling the story of what we all feel sometimes – what if I die before I fulfill my life’s purpose?

There is a lot to unpack in watching this film and it definitely has some tough parts.  When you are watching one of the greatest actors of our generation play a man going through a life crisis over the course of decades, it’s not exactly a happy story.  Like most of Kaufman’s movies, he inserts messages and symbolism throughout, ranging from very subtle to the obvious.  After finishing the film, I decided to read up on it to explore some of the themes and see what I may have missed that could help me understand it.  I stumbled upon a Youtube video on a movie channel called “Your Movie Sucks,” where the creator walked through some of the themes and subtle messages.  I was intrigued with the twenty minute video (published in 2014) which covered the first part of the film, so I went on to watch part two.  By the time I got through part three, the video’s creator noted that this examination of the film was taking longer than he anticipated and he had other projects he was working on, so he wasn’t sure when the next part would be done.  Part five was released 2 ½ years after the first part and still hadn’t gotten through the end of the film itself.  That was in June of 2017 and the next part still hasn’t been released.  At that point I realized that I would be waiting for the completion of a video series that analyzes a film about a director’s play that will never be finished.  And that is when I thought of the phrase “This made my hair hurt.” 

Now We’re Cooking – Being John Malkovich (1999)

The movie that put Charlie Kaufman on the map, directed by another creative genius (Spike Jonze), Being John Malkovich told the world to be ready for unconventional stories that will make you think.  We begin with Craig Schwartz, an out of work puppeteer (it’s a tough economy, you know), married to Lotte, a woman who desperately wants a baby, but fills her parental need by mothering a number of pets (we’re talking parakeets and chimps, not cats and dogs).  Feeling he must finally buckle down and get a job, he goes to the Mertin-Flemmer building to meet with Dr. Lester for a job at Lester’s company on the 7 ½th floor of the building.  Why is there a half floor between the 7^th and 8^th floors?  Just go with it – that’s the least of our concerns here.  When Craig begins his job as a filing clerk (because puppeteers have such great hands, you see), he develops a crush on another co-worker, Maxine, and one day discovers a hidden door behind a filing cabinet.  When he goes through the door, he travels down a short tunnel, discovering that it is a portal into the brain of actor John Malkovich, where you spend some time experiencing what it’s like to be Malkovich, before getting dumped out onto a ditch next to the New Jersey Turnpike.  That’s just the first twenty minutes.

When Craig and Maxine decide to turn their “ride” into a business, all hell ensues, including Craig’s wife developing an identity crisis about who she is, and Malkovich himself discovering the portal and going through the tunnel, leading to the craziest scene in the film.  There is a lot of wackiness in this film, but like most of Kaufman’s work, there is a message – who are we really, what is our identity, why do we sometimes think about what it would be like to be someone else, when in reality we don’t know nearly enough about that other person’s life to know if it would be better than ours.  In addition to a wonderful script, we have some outstanding performances from John Cusack (as Craig, in one of his best roles), Cameron Diaz (playing against type as Craig’s disheveled wife, Lotte), Catherine Keener in a breakout role as Maxine, and Malkovich, playing himself in what has to be the wackiest performance of an actor playing themselves in a film.  In hindsight, it’s crazy to think that Malkovich was brave enough to take the role.  If it had gone badly, you wonder if it could have derailed his career at all.  But the film was a resounding success, resulting in two Oscar nominations – Best Director for Jonze and Best Screenplay for Kaufman.  Bonus trivia – this film was co-produced by Michael Stipe, lead singer of R.E.M., who is a partner in a film production company.  The success of Being John Malkovich would lead to the next opportunity afforded to Kaufman, where things get even stranger. 

The Nesting Doll Film – Adaptation (2002)

There have been plenty of movies about making movies, but this one is just a little more complicated than that.  To best understand the plot of Adaptation, it helps to understand a little background of the movie.  Following the success of Being John Malkovich, Kaufman was offered the opportunity to write a film adaptation of the non-fiction book The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean.  The book tells the story of eccentric horticulturist John Laroche, who poaches rare orchids from Florida swamplands with the help of Seminole Native Americans.  Kaufman struggled in writing the screenplay, suffering from writer’s block.  His solution?  Make the film about his attempt to adapt the story, in addition to the story itself.  He wrote himself INTO the screenplay.  A meta movie, to say the least.  But wait it gets better.

Kaufman is played by Nicholas Cage, who also plays Kaufman’s twin brother Donald.  One small detail – Kaufman doesn’t really have a twin brother, but that didn’t stop him from creating one for the film, and listing him as co-writer of the Adaptation screenplay.  They “both” received Oscar nominations for “co-writing” the screenplay.  While Charlie Kaufman is struggling to get words on the page, his brother discovers that writing is a breeze, quickly writing the screenplay for his incomprehensible story and getting it sold, to Charlie’s dismay.  Cage is brilliant in the role of the two brothers, especially when Charlie is experiencing the height of his manic writer’s block.  There are also a few funny moments when Charlie is on the set of Being John Malkovich and we get to see a few of the actors reprising their roles from that film.  Aside from the Kaufman story, we have the plotline of Orlean (played by Meryl Streep) investigating the actions of Laroche (played by Chris Cooper, in an Oscar-winning role).  The two develop a romantic relationship that was created for the film, and not part of the original book by Orlean.  Streep and Cooper are both excellent in their roles, but the winner here is Cage who embodies the craziness of Kaufman and his brother.  What impresses me the most about this film is the courage of the studio to go forward with an unconventional story.  After you watch Being John Malkovich and Adaption, I strongly recommend my favorite film of Kaufman’s, which is up next. 

The Masterpiece Love Story – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

What if you could have your most painful memories erased from your brain?  That is the question at the heart of what I consider Kaufman’s best film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, an unconventional (what else?) love story starring Jim Carey and Kate Winslet.  I’ve mentioned a few times during this post that Kaufman’s work can be tough to follow and fully comprehend after only one viewing.  Sometimes watching and appreciating a Kaufman film can feel like “work” to truly understand and appreciate the story.  For the first part of the film, it can be a little jarring to follow the storyline, until you realize that he is using a nonlinear timeline to present the story of Joel and Clementine, the characters played by Carrey and Winslet.

Joel discovers that his ex-girlfriend Clementine has undergone a procedure in which all of her memories of Josh have been erased and she has no memory of even meeting him, let alone having a relationship with him.  Feeling despondent and heartbroken, he decides to undergo the same procedure, but starts to regret the decision while the procedure is in process.  Throughout the film, we see the full journey of Josh and Clementine, but told through flashbacks and memories and not in chronological order.  Joel desperately tries to hang on to just one good memory of Clementine, so he doesn’t forget her forever.  While he undergoes his procedure, we also meet the head of Lacuna (the firm who performs the procedure) and members of his staff.  Their stories are integral to the journey of Joel and Clementine and also have complications, to say the least.

This is definitely a film that meets the description I mentioned at the top of this week’s post – it rewards multiple viewings.  It helps better understand not just the story of Joel and Clementine, but you gain a deep appreciation for the performances.  This is my favorite kind of Jim Carrey performance – it’s not the over the top Ace Ventura; this is earnest, vulnerable, and sweet Jim Carrey – it reminds me a lot of his performance in The Truman Show.  Kate Winslet brings a wonderful combination of sweetness and bold individualism, determined to be who she wants to be.  The cast features a very strong supporting cast including Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, and Elijah Wood as members of Lacuna.  A film that will make you think about love, memories, relationships and the meaning of happiness, it would deliver Kaufman an Oscar for Best Screenplay.  You can’t go wrong with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

That’s all for this week.  I hope you enjoyed my look at one of our more talented filmmakers.  I will be off next week, but will be back in two weeks for part one of my fall movie preview.  Thanks again for reading and if you would like to be notified of future posts, you can subscribe here.