TIFF Review: Synecdoche, New York

Synecdoche, New York

Opening Date: 10/24/2008

TRAILER: n/a

ACCOMPLICES: Official Site

The Charge
synecdoche [Sih-NECK-doh-kee] -noun, a figure of speech in which a part of something stands for the whole or the whole for a part

Opening Statement
Equal parts inspiration and aggravation, Synecdoche, New York evokes comparisons to Last Year At Marienbad in many important ways. One easily admires the soul and artistic thought that went into creating such a challenging piece of filmmaking, and when one watches it, one hates ever bloody impenetrable second of it. Oblique, frustrating, dense and convoluted, this is a film on par with the most allegorical and metaphorical of French New Wave films and repels any attempt to easily unlock its secrets.

Facts of the Case
Theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is putting the finishing touches on his latest play in Schenectady, New York, but his home life is rapidly evaporating. He is alienated from his unhappy wife Adele (Catherine Keener) and she soon abandons him and moves to Berlin, taking their daughter Olive with her. Simultaneously, Caden seems to be falling apart physically; his autonomic functions are running haywire, and slowly, his body is shutting down.

Throwing himself into his work, Caden envisions a gigantic performance piece, and hires a massive amount of artists and a gigantic warehouse in New York City. He is obsessed with creating something real, something honest, and begins crafting a life-sized replica of his life, down to the people, getting actors to perform their roles. As the mock up grows, the cast expands exponentially. Theatrical relationships and personal relationships soon blur into an incoherent mess. Years fly by, and Caden rapidly becomes inseparable from his creation, unable to discern what parts of his life are being eroded.

The Evidence
When watching Synecdoche, New York one thing becomes immediately clear about Charlie Kaufman: the dude needs a wing man. In the past, Kaufman’s larger-than-life screenplays have triumphed due to the collaboration with visionary directors, usually Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze. More importantly than their particular directorial brilliance, a Kaufman-penned film was a two-man carnival; one man would drive, the other would shout obscenities out the window as the film sped past. Writer and director would act as control for the other, tempering Kaufman’s insane ideas with a firm directorial hand. Somebody was there to take a six hundred page screenplay and chop it down to two hundred pages. Someone was always saying to Kaufman, “No, you can’t do that, because that doesn’t make any sense.” The end result was brilliance; films that pushed the oeuvre without punching a hole right through it, quirky yet accessible. In Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman acts as both director and writer, and there is no one driving here. The film punches right through the wall of reason and keeps going in a Mobius loop of endless insanity.

Synecdoche, New York is less a film and more a gigantic sandbox where Kaufman can literally throw in any narrative scrap of anything he wants, and a movie appears. The results are unexpectedly mixed. One would have expected a Kaufman-headed film to be saturated with heady brilliance and quirkiness, but Synecdoche, New York is so often barely recognizable as a film in the traditional sense of the word. It more resembles the inner workings of a mentally ill person; a place where puzzle pieces are assembled in random order, where time leaps in unexpected directions and distances, where memories and dreams coalesce into unrecognizable messes. Time skips and leaps between scenes in the film with little explanation as to why or how long. Locations alternate between the real world and Caden’s make-believe experiment, and we are never quite sure which is which (neither is Caden towards the end). The film is so out into left field that we have left the ballpark entirely.

Obsessed with transience, Caden constructs a world within a world; a life-sized scale model of the city in a gigantic warehouse, hiring actors to come out and play parts of real-life people. Slowly, the “play” takes shape as a fully-functioning simulacra of Caden’s real world, but every answer about his life brings more questions. We have all the themes from Kaufman’s previous works: meek mild-mannered men and excessively fierce and strong women, abandonment (and lesbianism, go figure), alienation and loneliness. What little plot the film has is free-formed and extremely loose, like slack strings holding together a meditative exploration. Maudlin, sobering ideas on the brevity of our passing lives, endlessly obsessed with death—these things are tackled, and tackled again endlessly repeating. The more we learn about love and life, the more abstract and surreal the film becomes, until it accumulates in a literal apocalyptic deconstruction leaving everything torn asunder—including my brain.

Separating the convoluted, looping fragments from the inspired brilliance is hard, and I would be lying if I failed to note the film gave me a raging headache. I would also be lying if I pretended I didn’t love the challenge of it. As cinematic puzzles go, this one is a whopper. Kaufman has profound thoughts on his mind in this film, a serious, complex meditative exploration of life, death and art, and how the barriers that separate all three are often paper-thin. Imagine a film composed entirely of metaphor and metonymy, of simulacra stacked upon simulacra so thickly that the very notion of finding “reality” is a fool’s errand. Even the film’s title is a perfect play on this theme: Synecdoche, New York, an ironic re-working of the film’s primary location, Schenectady. The actual word itself, synecdoche, means “simultaneous understanding”, and is a type of conceptual metaphor that substitutes an important aspect of a literary character with a single body part. It is the kind of joke that only an English major could love.

Hoffman plays his role with his usual unflappable meandering style, and the part feels created specifically with him in mind. The rest of the cast are a bevy of beautiful women deliberately tweaked by Kaufman to be frumpy and plain—Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Catherine Keener and Emily Watson. Everyone in the film ages in leaps and bounds, and over the course of decades we see them in various configurations; some of them even play acting stand-in roles for the others, as if Caden himself is constantly bewildered by the women in his life and cannot keep them straight. As a director, Kaufman is surprisingly restrained, directing his piece with a flat, straightforward style, surprisingly reserved considering the utter insanity being captured on screen.

Honestly, there is only so much a review like this can accomplish. The experience of Synecdoche, New York needs to be felt to be believed—not seen, but felt. The film hits something intangible in your chest and twists it around. After sleeping and waking up the next day, I can still feel the film alive and kicking in my subconscious, upsetting my innards. It kind of makes me want to weep, if I was prone to, you know, uncontrollable weeping. I would be hard pressed to describe exactly if this was a good or a bad feeling, but any film that can evoke such a visceral response in its audience is worth something. For a split second, audiences know what it is like to truly live inside the world of Charlie Kaufman.

Hear that “whooshing” sound? That’s the sound of everyone going straight into therapy.

Closing Statement
Dense, impenetrable, quirky and utterly insane, Charlie Kaufman has created an entire universe for audiences to explore, unlock and muse upon, but it is a world where the very inner workings are alien to all outsiders. One cannot help but be taken aback by the sheer scope of the project, but Synecdoche, New York will require repeated viewings to unlock its inner workings. And probably some weeping.

The Verdict
Fascinating and frustrating in equal measure.

7/10

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