This film is funny, I certainly laughed out loud, but I ultimately did not get as much out of it as let's say Synecdoche, NY which this has been compared to. Maybe due to the fact that perhaps while a shorter film, S, NY is way more elaborate in the number of settings and number of characters and the nearly decades the story spans. This film by comparison ostensibly has 2 characters, occurs in a single night, has essentially 3 settings and is yet longer and you definitely feel the length.
The conceit that this movie advances, I have perhaps seen in one other movie - Pablo Larrain's Neruda.
There are any number of films with imagined characters - Fight Club, A Beautiful Mind etc. But the "lead character"/audience surrogate is almost always real. Neruda essentially muddies the waters by making an imagined character your narrator. So you have basically a non-existent point of view from which you are telling the story which is an interesting choice. This film does that too. We realize that the young woman is perhaps an imagined character though she is the audience surrogate and the audience has access to her thoughts. As a side note, she should have received top billing. You could argue giving Plemmons top billing telegraphs the film's conceit and/or doesn't fully embrace it.
The movie is deliberate to a fault and could reveal what it has to say much sooner. Is it maybe a function of Netflix? Is it making directors lazy because they are liberated from time constraints? This isn't the only unnecessarily long prestige film by Netflix.
I have to question the premise of the film and whether it really works. It CAN work and has worked in other instances, but has it worked in this instance? I am not sure.
So basically you could say the entire or much of the film is imagined. Again not a conceit we haven't seen before. Mulholland Drive, Mysteries Of Lisbon (though not everyone buys this one), Atonement etc are other examples and all of them mostly work because you to some extent see the imagined story of essentially a sympathetic or relatable character, the story seems rooted in a very specific trauma or ache which gives poignancy to the imagined tale. We can see exactly the heartache that is being worked out through a pathetically imagined tale. It is human and heartbreaking and eventually stunning. I don't quite think that is the case here. The Plemmons/janitor character seems anonymous, not very likable and there doesn't seem to be a tragedy that has to be gotten over or imagined away. I mean sure there is the generalized tragedy of perhaps thinking life hasn't been all that it could have been. No shit son, 100 billion other people felt the same way.
So overall I think the work lacks the specificity of his best work, and seeks to paint a rather anonymous portrait of malaise in broad strokes.
The film is intriguing for sure. There is some visual invention. There is a reasonable variety of shots in the lengthy car scenes to keep them interesting - perhaps a giveaway from Kaufman that the dialog itself wasn't interesting on its own so he had to keep changing angles and perspectives to keep those scenes at least visually engaging. (As a contrast, for example, Kiarostami might have filmed them in static long takes.)
Not one of his best films or scripts for sure but a fascinating watch nonetheless - a play on themes he has dabbled in before - as a miniature - on a smaller, limited, restricted scale.