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Synecdoche, New York

(No longer in theaters)
  • Rating: R — for language and some sexual content/nudity
  • Director: Charlie Kaufman   Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson
  • Running Time: 123 minutes
  • Reader Rating: Write a Review

Genre

Comedy, Drama

Producer

Anthony Bregman

Distributor

Sydney Kimmel Entertainment

Release Date

Oct 24, 2008

Release Notes

Limited

Official Website

Review

There’s something appealingly anti-psychological about Charlie Kaufman. As a Jew who explores the inner lives of anxious neurotic depressive solipsists, he could be expected to build his works around repressed traumas and cathartic revelations: very Freudian, very twentieth century. But Kaufman goes in the opposite direction. The whirlpool doesn’t circle in on painful personal truths—it moves outward, in ever-widening spirals, until identity is swallowed up by larger forces. In Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) studied an actor playing another version of Charlie Kaufman (Jon Cusack) while a Charlie Kaufman twin (also Nicolas Cage) lived out a contrapuntal, ante–Charlie Kaufman life—whereupon all the Charlies and Charlie creations were sucked into the maw of the movie-within-a-movie’s Hollywood story structure. Now, in Synecdoche, New York, his madly overambitious directorial debut, Kaufman contrives to display even more permutations of the self, on the way to the self’s dissolution. This epic dream play with its leaps through time and space, its characters and shadow characters, poses a momentous question: Uh … well … I’m not sure what question the movie is posing. The answer, though, is definitely “Death.”

The protagonist of Synecdoche, New York is Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a regional-theater director in a failing body and a failing marriage who is putting the final touches on a production of Death of a Salesman. The film’s first act is deft—realistic, but with little absurdist bumps that both goose you and give you goose bumps. The plumbing in Caden’s old house explodes and there’s blood in his pee and the set of his production is collapsing: decay, decay, decay. His painter wife (Catherine Keener) decamps for a show in Berlin with their 4-year-old daughter, Olive, which is when things begin to get extra-strange—when we leave the kind of drama embodied by Arthur Miller way behind. Groggy, morose, experiencing seizures and breaking out in pustules, Caden allows himself to be seduced by the dizzy redhead, Hazel (Samantha Morton), who lives in a house that is perpetually on fire; and then takes up with his needy blonde leading lady, Claire (Michelle Williams). The time frame blurs. Why can’t he get through to his wife in Berlin? Has she been gone a week? A year? Is that Olive in a German magazine covered in tattoos? This isn’t another movie in which the protagonist is dead and doesn’t know it???

The best thing to do with one’s spatial-temporal bewilderment is get over it and go with the free-associational flow: Synecdoche, New York cannot be diagrammed. It takes place near Schenectady and it is a synecdoche—a stand-in for something else that can be a stand-in for it. At some point, Caden wins a MacArthur “Genius” grant and decides to mount a semi-improvised dramatic epic in a vast moldering warehouse that will illuminate his own life. He has been trailed by a mysterious doppelgänger (Tom Noonan); now that man assumes Caden’s role, and becomes the director. Circles intersect: Hazel takes up with Caden No. 2 while Caden consoles himself with the younger, dishier Hazel No. 2 (Emily Watson). Caden’s jowls deepen; his hair turns white and falls out. People die. The man who has always been alone is even more alone. Slowly, he lets go of his notions of cause and effect, his identity, his specialness. Very slowly. Very, very slowly.

I died a little myself in the last half-hour of Synecdoche, New York, when the movie turned into a tone poem, an interminable threnody for a life barely lived. Part of the problem is that Kaufman doesn’t establish his director’s voice: He doesn’t vary the rhythm of his shots, and his camera watches neutrally as actors intone his increasingly portentous lines. There’s a hint of self-satire in the way that Caden overcomplicates things, but Kaufman seems to have acquired Woody Allen’s suspiciousness of comedy, and Hoffman is so dedicated to his character’s mopiness that he sucks the air out of the frame. It’s a bummer when your hero seems born to succumb.

On the plus side, Jon Brion contributes a four-note motif that conjures up a vivid sense of loss. A few of the actors come through. Keener’s bedraggled world-weariness is like a haiku, and Michelle Williams has a lyrical simplicity. A scene in which Caden meets his grown-up, ill daughter has a breathtaking visual effect: One of her leaf tattoos shrivels and falls off. It’s heartbreaking how rich this failed project is, with enough poetry for several great movies, but not enough push for one.

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