Since making his film debut as the oddball brain behind Being
John Malkovich roughly a decade ago, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman
has established himself as one of the movie medium’s singular and most
brilliant creative forces.
His films — he also wrote Adaptation, Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Confessions of a Dangerous
Mind — may be a genre unto themselves, but they aren’t
without precedence: There’s a bit of Woody Allen in his flustered,
neurotic protagonists. There’s some David Lynch in his
through-the-looking-glass surrealism. And the tendency to fictionalize
real lives has long been a postmodern practice.
All of these elements are in place for Synecdoche, New York,
Kaufman’s directorial debut, which feels like his most personal film
despite having made himself the lead character in
Adaptation.
Synecdoche, New York follows the format familiar from
Kaufman’s other scripts, in which initially realistic situations
unravel and at some point drop through a rabbit hole into outright
meta-ness and surrealism. The film stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as
regional theater director Caden Cotard, who is married, unhappily, to
artist Adele (Catherine Keener), with whom he shares a shabby two-story
house in Schenectady and a 4-year-old daughter, Olive.
As the film opens, Caden is staging an ambitious production of
Death of a Salesman while Adele is finishing up a set of
paintings for a show in Berlin. His wife’s departure — with
Olive, without him, and, to his surprise, for good — and a bit of
accidental head trauma throw the movie for a loop, speeding up time and
tearing at the fabric of the real.
Desperate and adrift, Caden gets a MacArthur “genius” grant and
decides to use the opportunity to stage a grand, autobiographical
theater piece about the mundane and tragic nature of the human
condition. He hires an actor to play him and has his new wife (Michelle
Williams) play herself on a life-size New York City set forever under
construction in a limitlessly huge warehouse. He hires actors and
writes them individual notes each day to inform their improvisations,
stuff like: “You were raped last night” and “You keep biting your
tongue.”
Reality and fiction — life and theater — begin to merge,
and the piece is never finished, of course — at least not
until death. It’s about the process of creation as the final product, a
process that replicates and begins to replace real life.
There are some tough, touching elements here, most of them involving
Caden’s estrangement from his daughter. But the unrelenting grimness
ultimately feels more maudlin and self-absorbed than perceptive.
Truthfully, I’ve never enjoyed Kaufman’s clever, anxious comedies as
much as I’m supposed to — with the sole exception of
Adaptation, which I do think is the best film anyone’s made
about the writing process — and so it is with Synecdoche,
New York. The film is ambitious, personal, accomplished, and quite
daring. And I kept waiting for it to end.
Synecdoche, New York
Opening Friday, November 21st
Ridgeway Four