Film Review: Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood

This review wants a new sub-genre in American cinema.

OK, let’s invent a new sub-genre, or at least give this type of film a name: ‘Hollyosophy’ (it’s that or else Phillywood, Sophwood, or Philosowood, the last of which sounds like the soon-to-be-leaked sex tape of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir). What is Hollyosophy? It’s a strain of philosophical Hollywood movies, it’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004), The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry, 2006), The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998), Synecdoche, New York. It’s a cluster of films interested in the nature of reality, linked by director Michel Gondry, Charlie Kaufman as writer, or Jim Carrey as the baffled lead. These films are often silly but thoughtful Hollywood movies which, with the help of computer generated imagery, fit into a neat, Hollyosophical package. It’s Socrates in sneakers, Nietszche in négligé (which gives new meaning to the ‘Freudian slip’). But Synecdoche, New York is a Foucault fart.

What Gondry and Kaufman nailed, Hollyosophically, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was visually-compelling mainstream thought-house cinema with the pseudo-indie sexiness of Kate Winslet and Kirsten Dunst, along with mondo-protagonist Jim Carrey. It’s also rather heartfelt and pretty, it made many a man reach for the sugar paper and pritt-stick. There was a gorgeous tune from pre-Scientology Beck, too: ‘Everyone’s got to learn sometime,’ was the refrain.

Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a theatre director convinced that he’s dying, so much so that Charlie Kaufman, director of Synecdoche, New York, allows us to inspect his hero’s poo. Subsequently, the murky shade of Caden’s poop is an aspect of Kaufman’s rather polluted mise-en-scene. Indeed, Kaufman exploits the physical unattractiveness of Caden (arguably a near-perfect rendition of himself, directorially) by filming in near constant close-up. A sense of claustrophobia comes through in admiring the new-to-Kafka Hazel (Samantha Morton), the vacant-to-starry-eyed Michelle Williams as Claire Keen, and Seymour Hoffman’s paunch.

Caden’s complaining is successful on two fronts: alienating Adele (Catherine Keener) and thus his darling daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein) (all the way over to Berlin), and secondly in getting beautiful younger women interested in him, namely Claire and Hazel. Caden’s lamentable woes are less from his own loneliness (which he tirelessly, forever underlines) and more his struggles with women: romantically with Morton, artistically with Williams, and emotionally with Adele. Though most damning is Olive’s disappearance with her mother, and her ‘conversion’ to Lesbianism at the age of ten by Adele’s Nabokovian chum Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh).

Seymour Hoffman’s Caden never learns, though. Unlike Carrey’s non-diegetic interior muttering in Eternal Sunshine, Caden never shuts up, there’s no measure to his flagrantly self-absorbed moaning. This probably is intended, but it’s just such a drag. Kaufman and Seymour Hoffman have created a really irritating character, but can you criticise them for that? It’s not a rhetorical question because I don’t know. Do you know? It might be a brilliant performance from Seymour Hoffman, and, via The Savages, he’s fine-tuned the moaner, down from somewhat likeable to entirely annoying. But even if his performance as a douche-bag is convincing, there are real problems with the latter stages of Synecdoche, New York in terms of coherence.

One thing clear enough in reading Synecdoche, New York textually is the magnitude of narrative threads running through it, if not the film’s attempt to regurgitate minor events. Caden tries to reconstruct his life, his many loves and apparent losses, in a gigantic old hangar. The sprawling mess of a ‘play’ never meets its audience in the conventional sense. It remains a work in progress for over seventeen-years. This plot line will signal, for much of its audience, the movie’s descent into nonsense. Kaufman has created what some might call a masterpiece, whereas others might question the obstinate second half that completely belies the notion of film as mild entertainment.

The Russian director Andrei Tarkvosky claimed that Robert Bresson was his favourite filmmaker because he achieved simplicity in cinema. What would Tarkovsky (or indeed Bresson) make of a movie like Synechdoche, New York. The little Tarkovsky in my head would comment on the nationality of the filmmaker and its lead, and call this a very American style of filmmaking. Aspects of self-indulgence are what Tarkovsky disliked about cinema most of all and he didn’t even have to contend with sexy blockbusters, he didn’t live to see the nineties. Tarkovsky’s public writings on film advise budding filmmakers to let the images speak for themselves, rather than trying to make a point, or the director desperately expressing an opinion. He believed you should present an event as clearly and plainly as you can, just as short story writer Anton Chekhov once told his chum Gorky not to write that ‘the waves crashed against the beach as if in anger’, or ‘the rain fell like tear drops’. The idea is that images have connotations all on their lonesome. So, Chekhov or Tarkovsky would probably cuss Kaufman out. Though not really.

But what’s the point in bringing up dead artists and comparing them to Synecdoche, New York? It’s an attempt to get some sort of cultural or philosophical (rather than Hollyosophical) perspective on the clutter amassed by Charlie Kaufman towards the end of his film. It might just be that here is the sort of film which is a bi-product of a self-obsessed age. I’m talking about this age, the one we live in right now, where many of us are in constant, artificial self-reflection. The idea that the internet, for example, has improved the quality of our social or individual lives is, IMO, false. There are many Caden Cotards among us, inspecting a different kind of poop, the kind smeared over interfaces or ‘walls’ as they’re called. And in the event of this constant, meticulous self- and physical-examination – am I good enough, am I hairy enough, am I too quiet? – is that you become a mini-pervert who makes bubbling boils of bug-bites and a cavernous wound of a splinter. LOL.

Generally, Kaufman’s Hollyosophy provides laughs with Caden’s uber-self-awareness, but these chuckles aren’t enough come the 120 minute mark. And in Synecdoche, New York’s case, it was a point ushered in with a painstaking sigh.