I’ve been a fan of the writing of Charlie Kaufman since I saw Being John Malkovich on a big screen. I was a bit amazed that someone came up with, well, that. Yes, the director is also important, but I wanted to be a writer myself back then, and I have always been more invested in clever dialogue and interesting plots as a result. As such, yes, it was Kaufman’s script that got my attention. I can’t claim to have seen all of Kaufman’s works, but his directorial debut of Synecdoche, New York was leaving The Criterion Channel by the end of the month. That seemed like a good enough reason to look into it.
Besides, the title works for me. When I teach poetry, there’s often talk of synecdoche, a poetic devise where the part of something stands in for the whole. Something told me Kaufman wasn’t using that title just to sound clever.
Theatrical director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is having a personal crisis. Professionally, his work is going well. Everywhere else is another story. His artist wife Adele (Catherine Keener) suddenly leaves him while on a trip to Germany, taking their young daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein) with her. His health may be falling apart. And while the Hazel (Samantha Morton), the woman who works out of the box office of his theater, is clearly smitten with him, his own hang-ups prevent him from doing much with a woman who clearly loves him more than he probably thinks he deserves. But then something amazing happens: Caden wins a MacArthur Foundation grant. Commonly known as a “genius grant,” these real world grants are given to people the MacArthur Foundation finds promising, coming in the form of a large amount of cash that the recipient can use however he or she sees fit. For someone like Caden, there’s only one thing to do with that sort of money: put on a play that will say something about the human condition in the truest way possible.
That means, essentially, setting up in a warehouse and slowly but surely transforming the inside into a facsimile of the real world, particularly Caden’s real life. Such an action blurs the line between the play and the real world, starting with Caden’s marriage to the lead actress, Claire (Michelle Williams), who will go on to play herself off-and-on while his life with her starts to oddly mirror the life he had with Adele, a fact Clarie is hardly interested in. Time passes, and Caden’s play becomes larger and larger in scope, hiring a man who’s been stalking him (Tom Noonan) to play him, recreating more and more of the real world, and all while ignoring how much the world outside his warehouse (and later warehouses) seems to be falling apart. Decades pass, Caden grows older, and the only real constants in his life are Hazel (who married someone else and had some children of her own) and this play that will seemingly never end. Is there a point where Caden’s play might actually have an audience? Or is this play doing something else?
This is a Kaufman script. Of course the play is doing something else. I’d say it was being therapeutic for Caden, but even the most positive of Kaufman scripts never get much better than melancholy. Caden, played by Hoffman as a shuffling, confused man trying to figure out life, particularly his own, is a man who takes a long time to maybe realize there are other people, and everyone has their own story. When an actor commits suicide, Caden’s reaction is outrage: the person the actor was playing didn’t do that. When Hazel is unavailable for something where Caden needs company, the actress playing her (Emily Watson) takes her place, and Caden marvels a bit how different she is off-stage when she isn’t playing Hazel. Caden is learning about life by trying to recreate it.
Does that mean there’s a happy ending to this story? Well, no. It’s still a Kaufman story. There are some ironic moments that prevent Caden from finding happiness for very long, and if he is about to have a breakthrough, something will stop him in the end. I expect that sort of thing, where Kaufman’s story will take an absurd turn that is both whimsical in a depressing manner and something that fits within the world Kaufman’s character inhabit. But how is he as a director? As with the other films I’ve seen him helm, he’s not a bad director, but I think he does better when someone else directs a script he wrote. Film, like theater, is a collaborative effort, and I think Kaufman benefits from that collaboration. It’s what makes a very good movie like Synecdoche, New York not quite reach the levels of something like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Grade: A-
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