A New York city street as modeled in a vast theatre, underneath an imprisoning roof of arched steel and flying overhead, an airship. A perfect visual summation of the concoction of Philip K Dick with Kafka weaved by Kaufman in his debut as director. Not that Kaufman would ever be simply guilty of repeating his influences, his own vision is enough of a creature itself to apprehend. And besides, most of all the movie poster leaves out the central being of this intensely focused film. Caden Cotard is slowly falling apart, and out of the decay is trying to realize his ultimate work. The film becomes an example of its own title, a synecdoche, as his projected play slowly envelops his life and becomes the reality, which supersedes life, or life miming art.
The kind of games, the playful literary technique in Synecdoche NY put this into the seriously enigmatic category, as though Woody Allen did acid before Manhattan. You look at the form, and after Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind this could well be Charlie Kaufman’s Gravity’s Rainbow or Infinite Jest. It’s a demonstration of a uniquely dense take on the “big themes” and has peerless invention, but it feels rather too concerned with itself as a post-modern exploration than a cinema experience.
The notes of a soul crying out against the awful, dreary world of ever encroaching death never quite connect in a way that moves, unlike Jon Brion’s song, Little Person, which beats away in the soundtrack like the missing heart of this work. Casting Phillip Seymour Hoffman should ring out the sadness which is poor Caden’s lot rather than the showing up the coldness of the design. It doesn’t matter how good you are. I felt for Diane Wiest when she comes to the reins late on, playing a version of Caden, she is given about the most important lines in the entire film and they sound so clunkily explicit, like a writer making his address.
But there’s easily enough in this to inspire reflection long after you’ve finished the film. No stranger to playing with time, Kaufman tells his story in a peculiar kind of temporal atrophy. Scenes continually allow the future into the present, and then later in the movie Caden is caught in a terminal rush where death is definitely the next stop, only we never arrive, we wait and see time itself as another lesson in narrative. This is very close in spirit to Beckett. It isn’t going to repeat the success of Eternal Sunshine, but for anyone bothered to make an effort it feels as though it would repay another viewing. Kaufman isn’t the kind of director to imitate, although there’s a distinct Punch-Drunk Love feel in all of this, albeit one which is amped into a very theatrical intelligence. If Adam Sandler and Emily Watson’s romance was about the West Coast promise of happiness in escape, then Caden’s lonely journey is rooted in an East Coast urban negativism.There is a notion of love in this but it keeps being strangled by a drive towards the darker side of a dreamy version of Caden’s life.
The story goes awry from the start when his wife walks out on him with their 4 year old daughter. Catherine Keener seems not quite the bitch she played in Being John Malkovich, but decides to leave for the art scene in Germany and entirely cuts off Caden. Kaufman can’t write anything remotely realistic about a break-up without going into overdrive – this isn’t Blood on the Tracks so much as Torture in A Berlin Sex Club. Just as Being John Malkovich was relaxed, even amused over the quite horrifying, as Malkovich regains his mind so briefly, again in Synecdoche there is a detachment obstructing its more heartfelt claims. Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s tears should be worth something more than this. Kaufman could have learnt much from the sincerity of Hoffman’s character in Love Liza, nevermind looking at Todd Luiso’s direction for how to make a downward spiralling life seem worth caring about.
The sheer abstraction in the narrative asks for more an effort of exegesis than viewerly pleasure. While in fantasies, the introductory is often the most beguiling here. Kaufman bides his time till he lets us in on the extent of his game with Caden Cotard. Turning mimesis inside out isn’t so original but the way it builds into a cumulative experience, where everything becomes another reflection of a reflection, every wall, every room, another piece to be restaged has at least, a flat out brilliant conceptual design even if steadily Kaufman’s trademark humour is drained from the film.
Perhaps it eclipses everything he’s done before, intellectually it does, but it makes the mortal error of being itself a part of Caden’s terminal drift towards death. There is no will to contrast the solipsistic stage of Caden’s descent. The happiness, as the Kaufman penned lyrics go, is somewhere, maybe some day far away….
Commander Travis
The kind of games, the playful literary technique in Synecdoche NY put this into the seriously enigmatic category, as though Woody Allen did acid before Manhattan. You look at the form, and after Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind this could well be Charlie Kaufman’s Gravity’s Rainbow or Infinite Jest. It’s a demonstration of a uniquely dense take on the “big themes” and has peerless invention, but it feels rather too concerned with itself as a post-modern exploration than a cinema experience.
The notes of a soul crying out against the awful, dreary world of ever encroaching death never quite connect in a way that moves, unlike Jon Brion’s song, Little Person, which beats away in the soundtrack like the missing heart of this work. Casting Phillip Seymour Hoffman should ring out the sadness which is poor Caden’s lot rather than the showing up the coldness of the design. It doesn’t matter how good you are. I felt for Diane Wiest when she comes to the reins late on, playing a version of Caden, she is given about the most important lines in the entire film and they sound so clunkily explicit, like a writer making his address.
But there’s easily enough in this to inspire reflection long after you’ve finished the film. No stranger to playing with time, Kaufman tells his story in a peculiar kind of temporal atrophy. Scenes continually allow the future into the present, and then later in the movie Caden is caught in a terminal rush where death is definitely the next stop, only we never arrive, we wait and see time itself as another lesson in narrative. This is very close in spirit to Beckett. It isn’t going to repeat the success of Eternal Sunshine, but for anyone bothered to make an effort it feels as though it would repay another viewing. Kaufman isn’t the kind of director to imitate, although there’s a distinct Punch-Drunk Love feel in all of this, albeit one which is amped into a very theatrical intelligence. If Adam Sandler and Emily Watson’s romance was about the West Coast promise of happiness in escape, then Caden’s lonely journey is rooted in an East Coast urban negativism.There is a notion of love in this but it keeps being strangled by a drive towards the darker side of a dreamy version of Caden’s life.
The story goes awry from the start when his wife walks out on him with their 4 year old daughter. Catherine Keener seems not quite the bitch she played in Being John Malkovich, but decides to leave for the art scene in Germany and entirely cuts off Caden. Kaufman can’t write anything remotely realistic about a break-up without going into overdrive – this isn’t Blood on the Tracks so much as Torture in A Berlin Sex Club. Just as Being John Malkovich was relaxed, even amused over the quite horrifying, as Malkovich regains his mind so briefly, again in Synecdoche there is a detachment obstructing its more heartfelt claims. Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s tears should be worth something more than this. Kaufman could have learnt much from the sincerity of Hoffman’s character in Love Liza, nevermind looking at Todd Luiso’s direction for how to make a downward spiralling life seem worth caring about.
The sheer abstraction in the narrative asks for more an effort of exegesis than viewerly pleasure. While in fantasies, the introductory is often the most beguiling here. Kaufman bides his time till he lets us in on the extent of his game with Caden Cotard. Turning mimesis inside out isn’t so original but the way it builds into a cumulative experience, where everything becomes another reflection of a reflection, every wall, every room, another piece to be restaged has at least, a flat out brilliant conceptual design even if steadily Kaufman’s trademark humour is drained from the film.
Perhaps it eclipses everything he’s done before, intellectually it does, but it makes the mortal error of being itself a part of Caden’s terminal drift towards death. There is no will to contrast the solipsistic stage of Caden’s descent. The happiness, as the Kaufman penned lyrics go, is somewhere, maybe some day far away….
Commander Travis
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