“Synecdoche, New York”

Here's my review of Charlie Kaufman's latest from The American Conservative:

Starting with 1999’s art-house sensation “Being John Malkovich,” Charlie Kaufman has cleverly made himself the best-known screenwriter in America by refusing almost all publicity … except that which he generates through his own intensely self-referential screenplays. The protagonist of his 2002 comedy “Adaptation” is a neurotic screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman, who is trying (and, unsurprisingly, failing) to adapt a New Yorker article about orchids into a big studio movie. Kaufman next dialed back the wit a bit in his masterpiece, the 2004 romantic drama “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”

He combines Woody Allen’s self-doubting persona with playwright Tom Stoppard’s conceptual razzle-dazzle in the service of metaphysically surrealist plots reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges. Kaufman justifies his movies’ intellectual demands by saying, reasonably enough, “One of the things I think is really exciting and joyful about the experience of being an audience member is figuring things out. When you make a connection, it’s yours …”

Having had his say on love in “Eternal Sunshine,” Kaufman is back to tell us all about life, death, and art in the first film he’s directed. “Synecdoche, New York” is an ultra-ambitious combination of the Great Artist’s Summation of His Life’s Work and self-parody.

Philip Seymour Hoffman (Best Actor-winner for “Capote”) plays Caden Cotard, a community theatre director in Schenectady, New York mounting yet another revival of “Death of a Salesman” for the blue-haired subscribers. He’s falling apart physically, suffering through an entire House, M.D. season of medical syndromes. Caden’s wife (Catherine Keener), an artist who paints microscopic pictures requiring magnifying goggles to view, tells him that he won’t be going to her exhibition in Berlin. She’s instead taking their four-year-old daughter and a friend, a sinister German lesbian (Jennifer Jason-Leigh).

At this nadir, Caden wins one of those obnoxious MacArthur Genius Grants. His health stabilizes and the women around him (“Synecdoche” features seven excellent actresses) look more fondly upon him. He decides to unleash his creative powers on a vast theatre project that will tell “the brutal truth” about, well, everything. In his bid for artistic immortality, he rents a cavernous warehouse in New York City, employs countless carpenters to build mockups of New York streets inside it, and hires a cast of thousands to live out their lives under his artistic direction. (Apparently, MacArthur grants have gone up several orders of magnitude in value.) Rehearsals go on for decades without reaching Opening Night. As the cast ages, they hire younger actors to play themselves playing their roles.

A “synecdoche,” which rhymes with Caden’s hometown of Schenectady, is a figure of speech in which the part stands for the whole (“threads” for clothes) or the whole for a part (“the law” for cops). Kaufman genially explains that if his movie is a hit, “then people will be able to pronounce it and everyone will be able to know the word ‘synecdoche’-- which is a good word to know.”

In “Synecdoche,” Kaufman indulges and satirizes both his aspirations and his failure to keep in mind the artistic value of abstraction and reduction. The film recalls Borges’s one-paragraph parable On Exactitude in Science:

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City ... In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, … delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars…

Similarly, as the now-aged Caden’s artistic charisma wanes in the mid-21st Century, the cast finally riots, chanting “Freedom!” Mobs of actors smash their way out of the set, which has grown to take over much of Manhattan.

Kaufman intended that the densely-packed “Synecdoche“ could only be fully appreciated after multiple viewings, but the first screening can be grueling. My wife loved it, but several people walked out. Yet, it’s occasionally hilarious, as when a real estate agent talks a character into buying a house that happens to be on fire. That’s even funnier in 2008 than when Kaufman dreamed it up.

My advice is to lower your expectations, then see it.

Rated R for language and some sexual content/nudity.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer