Synecdoche, New York | Charlie Kaufman, 2008
Attempting to explain the premise behind award winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York is like rushing to unravel a new roll of sticky tape with stunted fingernails. You think you’ve got it but you never truly have. You scrabble at the most accessible point until you break through, but in your enthusiasm realise that this has only exposed a deeper and stickier layer of meaning. This can be applied to most Kaufman films of course, and unlike a roll of tape they are never linear; there is rarely ever a beginning and end to his stories. Synecdoche, New York is Kaufman’s first attempt at directing and he appears to have approached this film as if he believes it to be both his first and last shot. It is a project of grand ambition from Kaufman and he pours absolutely everything into it. Synecdoche centers around the hypochondriacal form of theater director Caden Cotard (played by the outstanding Philip Seymour Hoffman) as he attempts to realise his weighty artistic ambitions and ultimately his life’s work. Over the course of the film we become one with Caden Cotard. We experience his love and his loss, his fears and desires, his worries and his flaws, everything that this man holds dear in life.
Synecdoche, New York is a film that requires time and perhaps even several viewings to digest fully. It is an extremely unsettling experience and has ruffled the feathers of more than a few weathered critics who to my own annoyance have often simply dismissed the film as being unworthy of such attention. I find it somewhat irksome then that with the kind of (to use Kaufman’s own preferred term) garbage that one can usually find in theaters today, people just aren’t willing to give a truly challenging film like this their time of day. It scares people. I’m fully aware of the current economic climate in America and tentative nature of investment in the industry as a result, but the fact that a product like this needs to fight for distribution is criminal. It’s not that the film is inaccessible either; it’s dense and arduous to wade through but is certainly a rewarding experience if given the chance. Synecdoche deals with time and space in a sprawling, almost offhand way as if these mere variables aren’t important in the grand scheme of things. There is no conventional narrative advancement or even structure here; one could say that Charlie Kaufman and his Synecdoche are way above such trivial aspects.
It is usually unheard of that a first-time director manages to rope in all the actors he asks yet this is no ordinary first-time director. It’s clear from watching Synecdoche that Charlie Kaufman has studied well under the likes of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry and appears to have inherited this ability to successfully blend that line between dreams and reality. There is a specific scene in Synecdoche where Samantha Morton’s character Hazel (the object of Caden’s desires) meets her estate agent about buying a house. The house in question is ordinary enough apart from the fact that it is engulfed at all times by lazy flames. Hazel points out quite matter-of-factly that while she loves the house, she’s “really concerned about dying in the fire” to which the estate agent responds “It’s a big decision, how one chooses to die.” Hazel ends up living in the curious house and it is this choice that influences her future and ultimately decides her fate, as do all the decisions we make throughout our lives. Another important character is Caden’s estranged wife Adele (Catherine Keener) who flees abroad with their daughter towards the beginning of the film. She is an artist whose work involves the fine painting of tiny portraits by hand that get smaller and smaller as the film wears on. While her work embraces minimalism, Caden’s does the exact opposite. His ambition and thus his final work grows progressively outward until just the idea is too much to process.
Synecdoche, New York is a crushingly sad film that deals with the undeniable fact that every one of us is hurtling towards the grave. It then shows us just how profoundly the realisation of this fact affects these characters. With Caden it turns him into a quivering mess of self doubts, morbid fantasies and crippling phobias and it is this funereal tone that the film assumes for its entirity. The film almost decays into nothingness as we watch, just as the final scene fades into white before the end credits begin to roll. It also deals with the idea of artistic ambition and how one shouldn’t limit what one wishes to achieve. Caden’s ambition soars but his project is never fully within his grip, therefore as it begins to unroll it quickly slips out of reach never to be seen again. Synecdoche’s strength lies, as with every project Kaufman touches, in the script itself. His skill as a writer is truly unrivalled in American cinema today and this debut feature is a wonderfully self-absorbed example of this. Given that he has also retained for the first time full artistic control over this project it gives us for the first time a closer look at what Kaufman imagines as he writes. His lines are often so understated but resound forever as do the characters he creates. Synecdoche, New York is very similar in this respect because while it made little impact upon release there is every chance people will still be studying it decades from now. For me it is that important.
Our Rating:
