Synecdoche, New York — he said, she said — movie review — screener!
Director: Charlie Kaufman
Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams
Genre: Drama
Release Date: Oct 24 (limited), Nov 7 (wide)
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SHE SAID:
If you’re a fan of Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation), you may worry that, as unique as he is, he may be a teensy bit predictable. Oh, okay so will his next movie have another adorable unkempt paranoid loser who can’t cease his neuroses for one second to realize that he’s truly happy? With Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman’s directorial debut, the answer is yes and no.
Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a dull guy leading a dull life in a dull town. Because of this, or more likely despite this, Caden is obsessed with mortality, flipping immediately to the obituaries during the morning newspaper nesting nicities, and being an exasperating mixture of accident-prone hypochondriac. Throughout the film, he visits various physicians and specialists (in creepy Silent Hill-esque clinics), behest to each one’s referral, fueling his inner sanctum of grief and ego. Ego?, you ask. Well, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden with a vulnerability with a volatile edge, like a jell-o balloon ready to pop and coat everyone around it in thick, negative goo. Caden affects everyone because he is an excellent stage director with clingy clueless actors, yet he doesn’t believe he has control over his own life. Characters in his presence either wither or swell, and maybe this is why his 
young daughter Olive has fluorescent green poop. (Yes, Synecdoche, New York will thrill you with more bodily fluids and functions than you’d want to witness, with feces of every color of the rainbow.) This is most certainly why his wife Adele (Catherine Keener) abandons him for another Charlie Kaufman lesbian addled fantasy/nightmare.
Thus begins Caden’s downward spiral. He can no longer keep track of time; a year is a week to him. He can’t seem to shake the sorrow of losing Adele and Olive, and becomes even more subconsciously self-destructive. He remarries and has another daughter, who he fondly refers to as “Olive and… the other one“, but still plods on aimlessly, selfishly. Hallucinations where television characters are replaced with his own caricature, novels are written just for him, and Olive’s old diary narrates her current life for him from thousands of miles away, further disorient him and his emotions. Such bizarre, surreal imagery and dialogue warp our initial perception of the overall message… is Kaufman being weird for weird’s sake here? What happened to his clever delivery? Is he watching too much late night Eraserhead and/or reading too much Beckett? (SIDE NOTE: the name “Beckett” appears on a produce crate in the background with Caden, fittingly upside down).
This is also where some scenes are a bit tedious; Jon Brion’s score thankfully redeems some scenes, along with the ever-awesome Hope Davis as an indifferent self-promoting therapist, and soundbits of squeaky vinyl shoes everywhere. In the middle, Synecdoche, New York flatlines a tad at a frustratingly boring hover, punctuated by awkward sex scenes where all the women “woo” like whores (in fact, have less tact than streetwalkers with their brazen “wanna fuck?”s), seemingly without direction, but then you realize (or I can only hope that you realize) near the end that that’s their very purpose. People wait forever, for a lifetime, for über magical moments, but in the end, it is the total sum of good and bad that we wished we appreciated at the time. Caught up in the ephemeral, caught up in the details — like Adele’s unfinished postage stamp painting, one face obscured and melted like a Francis Bacon study — caught up in an evil routine.
Caden’s evil routine becomes an insane 17-year trip to nowhere when he wins a grant and hopes to produce a grand masterpiece, holing up some 1000 actors and extras in a mammoth warehouse. Since he can no longer distinguish reality, he creates his own, hiring dopplegängers to portray him and other key people in his life. It isn’t so that he can watch it unfurl again in hopes of correcting his flailing path, but rather seems like just another procrastination attempt in his refusal towards self-acceptance. As Caden tirelessly builds new sets within sets, cities within cities, microcosm upon microcosm, it takes the term minutia to a whole new level. It brings home the point that an individual is interconnected with everyone, yet utterly alone; and everyone dies alone.
Now, this is not meant to be depressing, in fact, even as I was bawling like a baby (the only one in the room, as always, sheesh), Caden pushed through a slit in a plastic tarp… like being reborn, finally accepting his fate, his path, his journey, experiencing forgiveness, redemption. Finally realizing that by embracing the love of just one person, if only for just one day, means more than an entire lifetime of pining for global acclaim. Ironically, when presented in such a lackadaisical, fatalist farse, it’s enlightening and reassuring to realize how much control we really do have over our lives.
NOTE: I also love the idea that an unsuspecting housekeeper (played by impeccably pixie-voiced Dianne Wiest) could be omnipotent… like the janitor in the Breakfast Club who said “I am the eyes and ears of this institution, my friend”. Brilliant.
HE SAID:
Charlie Kaufman is known for his oddball, slightly surreal tales of endearing neurotics, and Synecdoche, New York is definitely his oddest, most complex tale yet. But it’s also his most oppressive, for with Synecdoche his neurosis has ventured far past melancholy into full blown depression. What starts out as a usual Kaufman yarn, complete with a surplus of laughs, quickly becomes a Kubler-Rossian meditation on death and dying, the futility of honest artistic aspiration and expression, the inherently shallow nature of human interactions, the pathetic fragility of the self, and the utmost importance of accepting things for what they are. And while the film’s philosophy may be bleak, it’s nonetheless deep.
First, an explanation of the title. The word synecdoche is defined as:
A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole (as hand for sailor), the whole for a part (as the law for police officer), the specific for the general (as cutthroat for assassin), the general for the specific (as thief for pickpocket), or the material for the thing made from it (as steel for sword).
In terms of the film, it also has meaning pertaining to substitutes and stand-ins, abstractions and impressions of reality, and the analysis and understanding of complex elements through increasing specificity. If it seems heady, that’s only because it is.
The film sees layer upon layer of such elements. Synecdoche, New York sees Philip Seymour Hoffman standing in as Kaufman facsimile, Caden Cotard, a Schenectady, New York based theater director obsessed with the finitude of his existence, and the inconsequentiality of his life’s work. His paranoia is made all the more intense with the onset of his rapidly, and mysterious failing health (as much a psychological affliction as a legitimate one. He even suffers Restless Leg Syndrome at one point), and the departure of his wife and daughter – the former a successful artist grown weary of her husband’s self-importance and lack of recognizable product. This all spurs him to create 
his wholly original masterpiece: an epic exercise in recreating the mundane, a play housed in an enormous warehouse, itself housing an artificial Schenectady, New York, populated by thousands of actors, each playing out the role of real Schenectadians – that is, real as seen through the eyes of Caden Cotard. But the play inevitably becomes an act of self-indulgence, with Cotard using the actors to reenact sequences from his own life, in increasing complexity and detail, in an effort towards better understanding himself and the world around him.
But therein lies another philosophical issue, that of the act of observing and it’s effect on the observed. Despite the attempt toward accurate portrayal, an actor inevitably brings a portion of themselves to their performance. And what can the actor hope to communicate if they don’t even share the same frame of reference as the director? Then, even assuming that the actor can truly abandon themselves, there’s the issue of the ego’s denial of reality even when faced with the playback of direct facsimile. Though Caden’s approach toward understanding himself is somewhat scientifically minded, it proves inherently flawed, corrupting and tangling the interactions and relationships of both actors and real persons. And that’s not even addressing the case of actors and entities trying to shape the play into their own design, as evidenced through two of the film’s more mysterious characters, a possible God and the Devil.
As the experiment goes on, the play continues to evolve on its own. Facsimile begets facsimile, and the play becomes something of the facing funhouse mirrors, plays within plays within plays, and actors playing the actors playing real people. But as the play spirals out of control, so does Caden’s grip on reality and time, with years whizzing past, and self discovery becoming all the more elusive. To free himself, Caden must come to grips with his own imperfection, selfishness, and egoism, and open 
himself to true human interaction.
When evaluated on terms of purely philosophical interest, the film’s nothing short of amazing, even if you don’t quite agree with that which is presented (As I certainly do not). The performances, too, are all noteworthy – Philip Seymour Hoffman gives one of his best performances to date. But what brings down the film are simple issues if pacing and protagonist identification. There are parts of the picture, especially toward the mid-section, that simply drag to the point of tedium. And the tedium is only amplified by the main character’s inability, and possibly resistance, to put aside his hangups of the self and just act like a basic human being. Ironically, he laments other people putting their own misery ahead of everyone else’s, while doing the exact thing himself. But, then again, that’s part of the point of the film. I guess the only legitimate criticism I can level at the film is that there’s a sense of the perverse to aspects of the picture that didn’t quite sit right with me. For example, a sexual tryst in a house where a character’s mother had been killed in the next room, and the aftermath never cleaned up. It all just seemed to cement the fact that Caden was nothing more than a cad, leaving me to wonder why I was bothering watching him mired in self-inflicted misery.
In many ways, Synecdoche, New York is as flawed as its main character. A little long, a little tiresome, and a little self-indulgent. But at the same time, it is an intriguing exercise, a thought provoking piece of cinema, and one that demands re-watching for proper appreciation. At the very least, Synecdoche, New York is a promise of greater things to come from writer, and now Director, Charles Kaufman.
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