I Lost It at the Movies

“It’s all planned, but it isn’t thought out,” wrote Pauline Kael in her review of A Woman Under the Influence (1974), a nifty bit of critical jiu-jitsu turning John Cassavetes’ much-theorized—and, during Kael’s reign at The New Yorker, much-derided—technique of spontaneous improvisation within a dramatic framework against him. For Kael, Cassavetes’ singular talent was for conveying the inchoate agony of “intense suffering from nameless causes;” however, watching this approach deployed in a character study about a schizophrenic wife and mother subjected to shock treatment, she perceived only sadistic indulgence masquerading as empathy. Hence Kael’s disparaging assessment of A Woman Under the Influence as a “murky, ragmop movie” punctuated by moments of “idiot symbolism,” and built around a performance by Gena Rowlands that was “enough for a half dozen tours de force, a whole row of Oscars…it’s exhausting.”

These and other enduring verses of Kaelian apostasy are, bizarrely, present in Charlie Kaufman’s new movie ventriloquized word for word by “The Young Woman” (Jessie Buckley, initially referred to as “Lucy”) in the midst of a long, snow-flecked car ride through Oklahoma with her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons). To explain The Young Woman is motivated to quote Kael’s review of that particular motion picture at length (and in a passable imitation of the late critic’s clipped, hectoring diction) is at once largely inconsequential to one’s enjoyment of a film with many other, weirder flourishes, and also deeply revealing, both of the intricate conceptual blueprinting at the heart of Kaufman’s venture—which, if nothing else, has been planned thought out—as well as of the various conceits and grievances consuming the filmmaker of late. It’s hardly a literary spoiler to reveal that Canadian author (and Toronto Raptors fan) Iain Reid’s 2016 source novel of the written either parallel or at least in close proximity to his adaptation of , is crammed with such stuff.