Movie Review: 'Synecdoche, New York'

This is the part where I act like an authority on entertainment, and criticize the work of professionals who are, without exception, more successful than I in the industry in which we both work. Some people would say this is proof I have "balls", or "chutzpah" in Jewspeak. Others would say it's proof I'm a "douchebag". To catch up on any old reviews, you can find the link on the right hand side of the page, or click here.

Until now, I've stuck to TV reviews because the pickings at the box office have been pretty slim (I considered 'What Just Happened' and 'W.', but neither inspired me enough), and I knew the year-end Oscar release were right around the corner. So, like a man waiting for his steak to arrive avoids eating dinner rolls which might ruin his appetite, I bided my time. Friday, Oscar season officially opened with the LA release of Clint Eastwood's 'Changeling' and Charlie Kaufman's 'Synecdoche, New York', two films I've been looking forward to all year. Despite mixed early reviews, I chose to see the latter.

The most interesting filmmaker in the world has made the most interesting film of the year.

In ’Adaptation’, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman took us through the looking glass. In his directorial debut, ‘Synecdoche, New York’, he goes (at least) a step further, creating the cinematic equivalent of holding a mirror up to another mirror. If I was tasked to write a one-word review, it would be "Metapocalypse". Given two, it might be "Mind fuck".

The title provides plenty of evidence as to what kind of film Kaufman delivers. The word “synecdoche” is a trope, a rhetorical figure of speech that consists of a play on words. The definition is akin to a metaphor: a term denoting a part of something which is used to represent the whole, or a whole of something which is used to represent a part. In Kaufman’s hands, it’s used in several respects –- people who replace one person with another in their lives, the way in which writers use characters to substitute for real people, the way actors use themselves (and are used) to represent other people. It's metaphorgasmic!

Added to the layers of meaning is the fact the movie takes place in Schenectady, New York, which may be spelled differently then "Synecdoche, New York", but is pronounced very similarly. That's yet another trope. Or rather, a trope within a trope -- yet another clue to the storyline: Kaufman is telling us in the title that nothing here is quite what it seems, everything is standing in for something else.

That’s not just the subtext, that’s the actual story. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s theater director, Caden Cotard, isn’t just a stand-in for Kaufman, the project he takes on -– his opus, a huge production planned after he wins a grant, then comes across a gargantuan dirigible hangar in New York City –- is a metaphor for all life as we know it. "It's a play about death. Birth. Life. Family. It's about everything," Caden explains.

Other metaphors abound. When the film opens on Caden getting up in the morning as a radio conversation in the background discusses why there is so much written about the autumn -– because that’s when things start to die -– we know we are going to be spending time inside the mind of a writer obsessed with his own mortality. It’s no surprise then to find the play Caden is currently directing is “Death of a Salesman”.

Kaufman plays it relatively straight through the first third of the film, introducing us to Caden, his wife, Adele (Catherine Keener), a painter of works so small one must view them through microscopes, and their daughter, Olive. The marriage is clearly troubled, as evidenced by Adele and Caden’s visit to their marriage therapist, Dr. Gravis (Hope Davis), a self-help book author with clearly visible insecurities of her own.

After Adele leaves with Olive to work in Germany, a pattern emerges. Caden pushes women away with his sullen, self-obsessed ways, then immediately longs for them –- or at least the nostalgia of them while he ignores the new woman he’s found. Time also slips away from him, he seems to have no concept of it at all.

When Adele immediately gets famous, and then soon after her friend and his daughter, another pattern emerges –- Caden lives through every artist’s nightmare. He’s forced to watch as everyone around him becomes acclaimed for their work -– Adele for her painting, Adele’s friend, Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh), for her tattoos, and his own young daughter for her body (don’t ask). His nervous system shuts down, and he needs assistance to do any number of simple things -- like the artist who’s lived inside their own head for too long and can no longer interact with society around them.

But the film really takes a turn for the weird when Hazel (Samantha Morton), Caden’s sometime love interest, buys a house while it is actually on fire. The house stays ablaze the rest of the film -– over the course of several decades -– as if to symbolize the constant upheaval going on around us.

Through it all, Caden can only see himself. So much so, he sees his image in cartoons on TV, in movie posters, in ads on Internet. It’s myopia, plain and simple. And it’s this which leads him to the idea to construct a play which could cover every small detail and nuance of human existence. His huge and ever-growing cast -– each instructed to basically play themselves -- constantly rehearse in his hangar. For so long, in fact, that Caden realizes he has affected the production to such an extent an actor must be cast to play his part. That actor (the always great, always creepy Tom Noonan) then becomes such an influence on the set that an actor must be cast to play the role of first actor.

Confused? Don't worry, it isn’t a Charlie Kaufman movie if you’re not.

With more actors hired to play cast and crew members, the scope of the production soon spirals out of control. Eventually, a second hangar must be built inside the first to represent the entirety of the production -- the rest presumably the city. Then another hangar is built inside the second one, and so on, and so on. The lines become so blurred, you’re not even sure there are, in fact, any lines at all.

At some point you realize it’s a show that can never go on -- the storyline grows every time the auteur thinks about it. Caden sets out to tell a story about everything, but like any creative soul, he inevitably ends up telling one about himself. He pours everything in his life into his work, and it ruins his relationships, which causes him depression and self-loathing, which in turn gets poured right back into his work –- like everything else in the movie, it's a vicious circle, similiar to Ouroboros the mythical snake who eats himself, which Kaufman referenced in ’Adaptation’.

The entire film is like Kaufman's vision of the M.C. Escher's painting where people ascend a staircase in a continual loop. Escher's work is a trick of the eye, Kaufman's his a trick of the mind. I imagine you need a mind as obsessive as Caden's -- yet more adept at self-analysis -- to be capable of coming up with the concepts Kaufman does routinely. Here, he's clearly drawing from his own creative feelings, worries about obsession, navel-gazing, paralysis by analysis, mortality, and probably a whole host of things which flew right over my head, and milking it for all the perverse pleasure imaginable.

With surrealistic, thickly detailed work such as this, you need a top-notch cast, all giving great performances, to have any shot at pulling it off. Kaufman gets everything he could ask for from a stellar cast of independent film vets in Hoffman, Keener, Leigh, Morton, Noonan, Davis and Emily Watson (another sometime love interest in Caden’s life). Michelle Williams also holds her own with these heavyweights as a young actress smitten, then disenchanted, with Caden’s creative obsession. Hoffman could be in for another Oscar nomination, perhaps even Morton, but it's a testimony to both the performances and the material to say the characters simply blend in. Sometimes, I think the old referee test works with actors as well -- you know they're doing a good job if you don't notice them.

The ’Adaptation’ screenplay won Kaufman an Oscar, and this one might very well make it two. Although, it should be mentioned, his win had a slightly lower degree of difficulty because it was for Best Adapted Screenplay despite the fact it was taken as far afield from the source material as any adaptation in recorded history.* Still, I’d be surprised if this one isn’t a nominee for Best Original Screenplay this spring.

But make no mistake, ’Synecdoche' is not for everyone. It won't play well in middle America with Joe the plumber the average Joe. Its orgy of symbolism will have creative types rejoicing, but it will fly right over most people’s heads. It’s esoteric, like a metaphor for metaphors. It’s slowly paced, heartbreakingly melancholy, and filled with humor that's dryer than Arizona in the summer. It makes you work to enjoy it. Some people will call it self-obsessed and self-indulgent, Because that’s exactly what it is. That’s the whole point –- revealing just how deep some artists can live within their own minds. It's like Charlie Kaufman lifting up the hood to his idling brain and allowing us to peer in for a moment, to see the machinery at work. I, for one, can’t look away.

Using the age-old Hollywood scale of judgment –- HIGHLY RECOMMEND/RECOMMEND/CONSIDER/PASS (circle one) -– I rate ’Synecdoche, New York’:

HIGHLY RECOMMEND

* Not too many screenwriters can get away with adding themselves to the story, let alone turning the author of the source material into a drug-addled slut for dramatic effect. Then again, there’s only one I know of who’d dare try either.