Get the latest gossip
All 9 Charlie Kaufman Movies, Ranked
The writer-director’s decidedly un-spotless mind is a Hollywood anomaly.
Adapting his own audio play with the help of co-director Duke Johnson, Kaufman unfurls the depressive tale of a motivational speaker (David Thewlis) plagued by a rare condition that causes him to perceive that every person he meets has the exact same face and speaks in the same voice, which happens to be Tom Noonan’s. If there’s a defining line of dialogue across Kaufman’s brainy filmography, it’s probably what Jake (Jesse Plemons) says to girlfriend Lucy (Jessie Buckley) at the top of this discombobulating Netflix nightmare: “It’s good to remind yourself that the world’s larger than inside your own head.” The subsequent road trip to meet his parents challenges that assertion, objective reality gradually coming unglued as names, relationships, and chronology shift around the lovebirds. It’s frankly astonishing that the Hollywood machine got behind such an absurdist fantasy, the unlikely story of a pathetic puppeteer (John Cusack, never better) whose attempts to cheerfully cheat on his wife (Cameron Diaz) with a co-worker (Catherine Keener) lead him straight into the noggin of a famous character actor.
Or read this on VULTURE
