Synecdoche, New York Charlie Kaufman USA 2009
The film Synecdoche, New York bombards the viewer with lunatic moments.
Take the scene in which an estate agent escorts a client around a house. Something seems hideously wrong. Smoke fills the air and glowing embers flicker in the walls. The house is on fire! But nobody notices. Instead the buyer demurs with money concerns before eventually deciding to move in. Later on in the film she dies of - wait for it - smoke inhalation.
This is the work of Charlie Kaufman, arguably Hollywood's most prominent scriptwriter and author of such modern classics such as Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Synecdoche, New York, a story about the artist in relation to his environment, marks his directorial debut. Densely layered with meaning, audacious in its scope and full of intriguing characters, the film delivers his best script yet. Like the word synecdoche (pronounced si-nek-duh-kee), a figure of speech where something denotes more or less than its literal meaning, Kaufman's method here of breaking up his plot with funny offbeat interludes has exactly the same effect with the film. It will keep audiences pulling the various threads apart for years; but he shouldn't have directed it.
Previous Kaufman films made by other directors remain memorable both for their story and their look. Take the unforgettable scene in ‘Being John Malkovich' where Malkovich enters the portal to his own head and discovers a world entirely populated by himself. ‘Synecdoche, New York' has no such moment. Knocking the look of Synecdoche, New York, when its script and cast are so good, feels a little like criticising a surreal painting by Salvador Dali for not having sound. Film is lead by the visual though, making the end result less than it could have been.
Yet, Synecdoche, New York, with a cast including Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton and Michelle Williams amongst many other talents, shines through.
The film follows theatre director Caden Cotard (played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) as he struggles with his new play, doomed relationships with the women in his life and his growing physical ailments. After his wife leaves, Caden mounts an ambitious attempt to finally do something meaningful. His play, gradually ballooning to occupy a replica of New York within a massive warehouse, spends decades in rehearsal. Increasingly everybody he knows receives actors to play themselves, including himself, who in turn receive their own doubles and triples as the play attempts to depict life in its entirety.
Some characters carry immediate resonance, such as Caden's wife Adele who, paints miniature works of art requiring magnifying glasses to view them. Others, such as the woman moving into the burning house, murmur away in the audience's sub-conscious. And finally, others still make no immediate sense whatsoever. As Caden casts himself in his play a man appears at audition claiming to have stalked the director for the past 20 years. Naturally he gets the part, no questions asked. Why? That's what makes the film so engaging.
