Kelly Wand"Synecdoche*, New York" review
December 17th 2008 00:11
Philip Seymour Hoffman realizes he and his wife are headed in opposite artistic directions.
Synecdoche, New York is everything you’d expect from Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, an ambitious, occasionally hilarious but mostly bleak, nihilistic dissection of life, failure, growing old, and death, perversely disguised as a shaggy-dog story about a guy trying to write a play. D.F. Wallace would have savored it.
Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a lonely, ineffectual, middle-aged playwright Caden Cotard (an anagram I still haven’t figured out yet), who one day receives a MacArthur genius grant and decides to use it to write a new play based on his mostly miserable life even as it’s unfolding in real-time. Though the original stage assigned for this production is an already cavernous warehouse the size of ten Spruce Goose hangars, the set somehow gradually comes to encompass all of Manhattan (and possibly the world and universe), all in an apparently endless series of bigger warehouses with increasingly larger casts of “extras.” Kaufman’s thesis is deceptively simple: life is kinda like a play, with us constantly performing assigned roles, being where we’re supposed to be according to what clocks say, and auditioning new people as both leads and bit players in our own life stories, even including new us-es. And it's even more like a confusing movie: piled collages of longing and disappointment occasionally leavened by a kind gesture, a series of tragedies and sexual partners, and some CGI.
The concept may sound one-trick-pony-ish and it is, but only in the sense that any simple truth is. Though ostensibly about a stage production, Kaufman plays lots of cool tricks with time and space, compressing 40 years into so many brief snapshots in ambiguous locations that even Philip Seymour Hoffman’s literally long-suffering protagonist always sounds faintly bewildered. Kaufman’s point is that we’re all bewildered, and it’s the ones who don’t seem to be that you really can’t trust.
Hoffman plays weary genius failure Caden Cotard as a smarter, more tenacious version of Tom Hanks’ character at the beginning of Joe vs. the Volcano. His toilet’s always broken. His sentences always seem to trail off into resigned silence. For the entire forty years of his life covered in the movie, he seems to be dying. He’s lonely by nature and avocation (the writing life suggests a willingness to be lonely), a condition vastly exacerbated when wife Adele, played by Catherine Keener, does what most Keener characters married to playwrights do and takes off to Berlin with their daughter Olive and her lesbian lover Maria, where she becomes critically renowned for painting still-arts the size of postage stamps. One at a time, Caden’s parents die horribly. Then things go downhill.
He falls in and out of relationships with a redhead named Hazel (Samantha Morton, lush and vivacious) and a blonde actress named Claire (Michelle Williams, ditto). As his face ages, the faces in his life and cast change accordingly. Tom Noonan, the guy who played Dolarhyde in Michael Mann’s version of Red Dragon, offers to play him, Caden, in Caden’s play, and when he dies during a rehearsal (in a dramatic paean to method acting), Dianne Wiest’s Ellen Bascomb takes over (the running gag is that for a man directing the world’s largest play, Caden seems to have little control over his own life).
Brilliant surreal asides abound, amusingly skewering the creepy nature of modern life in industrialized society. Hazel buys a house that’s permanently on fire from a smiling realtor. Doctors offer grim, cryptic contradictions with vague finality. Caden’s therapist Hope Davis, whose long lovely legs are tipped with elegant shoes visibly deforming her feet, devotes most of their sessions to selling him her self-help books. Faceless militia order people onto buses headed for “Funtown”. Caden buys his daughter a pink cardboard box labeled “Nose” because she loves pink. It’s all senseless, except that it’s all true.
Kaufman’s not laughing, he’s grappling with Real Issues, and the movie punishes audiences. It makes Brazil look like Frank Capra. It’s a masterpiece.
Since it didn’t make as much at the box office as Taco Bell paid to have the Transformers logo inscribed on its burrito wrappers for two weeks, though, it’s unlikely that Kaufman will ever be given this kind of budget ever again, even if he delivered far more than what any sane investor should have expected in terms of artistic merit. Creative genius and profit don’t always go hand in hand (which is one of the movie’s points). But since I’m an optimist, I entertain hopes that a hundred billionaire patrons of the arts will be personally moved by this movie, and give Kaufman a million dollars each to finance his next film. So he can really go nuts. For once.
* The use of synecdoche is a common way to emphasize an important aspect of a fictional character; for example, a character might be consistently described by a single body part, such as the eyes, which come to represent the character. This is often used when the main character does not know or care about the names of the characters that he/she is referring to. – Anonymous Wikipedia contributor #61734674673
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