Best of 2020: Hamilton Leithauser on Charlie Kaufman’s Other Big Project of This Year

Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind got me good this year. The narrator is this hyper-obsessive, hyper-progressive jerk who is desperately afraid of offending any minority group, but repulses nearly every person he meets. He’s also a rage-filled, pretentious, envious, and unsuccessful movie critic who trashes his own daughter’s film on his blog. The neurotic jargon gag worked for the entirety of the novel’s considerable length (though I do wish it had been about 150 pages shorter). That said, Donald Trump screwing an identical cyborg version of himself was very well written. While I was reading Antkind  I also watched Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things on Netflix (which is based on a book I have not read), which, like Antkind, metamorphoses into a surreal dream-state in order to reveal the story’s theme, which is actually quite a clever mechanism in both the book and the film. Neither is a “gotcha” gag — they’re more like slow-burning realizations. I recommend the movie as well (although I do think it too could have been trimmed by about 20 percent), as it features fantastic performances by both leads, most notably Jessie Buckley, who I thought was nothing short of amazing.