Director/writer: Charlie Kaufman
Photography: Frederick Elmes
Music: Jon Brion, Deanna Storey
Editor: Robert Frazen
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, Hope Davis, Tom Noonan, Sadie Goldstein, Robin Weigert
Movies are collaborative work practically by definition but those like me continually tempted to assign credit to a single person, or “auteur,” generally focus on directors. The director and writer of this picture, however—Charlie Kaufman—is something of an exception. Synecdoche, New York is only his first picture as a director, but he was already known for three screenplays: Being John Malkovich, Adaptation., and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. All won high praise and awards. Spike Jonze directed the first two, Michel Gondry the latter. They are weird and original with ingenious high concept, open neurosis, and inspired narrative surprises. And they are known basically as “Charlie Kaufman movies” in the same way that we hear about Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, or David Lynch movies. Or that’s the career brand hoped for.
In 2008, appearing in a Charlie Kaufman movie had great attractions for ambitious actors. Think of Woody Allen, or Terence Malick with The Thin Red Line. The A-list players flocked to them, and Synecdoche looks much the same, with Philip Seymour Hoffman and no fewer than seven of the most in-demand women actors at the time. I only wonder how Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton missed out. Yet, unfortunately, it all adds up to less than even Adaptation., which, until this point, had been Kaufman’s weakest picture. I’m not even sure how to summarize this quivering mess except by analogy: it might be worth pairing with a more recent quivering mess, director and writer (“auteur”) Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid, for a long double feature journey into a night of head-spinning and bodies all over the street. Pie and coffee served with discussion until 4 a.m.
Movies are collaborative work practically by definition but those like me continually tempted to assign credit to a single person, or “auteur,” generally focus on directors. The director and writer of this picture, however—Charlie Kaufman—is something of an exception. Synecdoche, New York is only his first picture as a director, but he was already known for three screenplays: Being John Malkovich, Adaptation., and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. All won high praise and awards. Spike Jonze directed the first two, Michel Gondry the latter. They are weird and original with ingenious high concept, open neurosis, and inspired narrative surprises. And they are known basically as “Charlie Kaufman movies” in the same way that we hear about Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, or David Lynch movies. Or that’s the career brand hoped for.
In 2008, appearing in a Charlie Kaufman movie had great attractions for ambitious actors. Think of Woody Allen, or Terence Malick with The Thin Red Line. The A-list players flocked to them, and Synecdoche looks much the same, with Philip Seymour Hoffman and no fewer than seven of the most in-demand women actors at the time. I only wonder how Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton missed out. Yet, unfortunately, it all adds up to less than even Adaptation., which, until this point, had been Kaufman’s weakest picture. I’m not even sure how to summarize this quivering mess except by analogy: it might be worth pairing with a more recent quivering mess, director and writer (“auteur”) Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid, for a long double feature journey into a night of head-spinning and bodies all over the street. Pie and coffee served with discussion until 4 a.m.
Caden Cotard (Hoffman) is a theater director devoted to The Theatre. He’s a hypochondriac and his marriage is falling apart, but his career is going pretty well. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) is a painter of miniatures coming into her own reputation as an artist. They have a daughter, Olive, but early in the movie Adele leaves Caden and takes Olive with her. Caden complains constantly about being lonely but his evident self-loathing is repellent even from over here, let alone if you’re living with or even just friends with him. Hoffman’s ability to be repulsive was one of his greatest strengths. But here Caden is apparently as brilliant as he is tormented. He stages a pioneering version of Death of a Salesman and finds himself awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant. Huzzah!
Then time warps, it becomes harder to follow with clarity or maybe I was just bored with it. There’s a lot of talent here, a lot of little set-piece cameo scenes that can delight with the surprise of recognition. Caden has an affair with the box office ticket-taker, Hazel (Samantha Morton). He can’t offer her much and eventually she moves on, only to return later. Emily Watson—who I have long tended to confuse with Morton (which one was in Punch-Drunk Love? which one was in Breaking the Waves? which one was in Dolores Claiborne?)—Watson plays an actor who is playing Hazel in the grand unified theory of Caden’s masterwork production, which he is spending his grant money on, title still TBD.
Jennifer Jason Leigh as Maria has little screen time, but her character’s impact is felt as Adele’s implied lesbian lover who corrupts Olive. The adult Olive (Robin Weigert) eventually becomes a tattooed stripper at a peep show place. A titanic confrontation with Caden occurs there, reminiscent of George C. Scott’s meltdown in director and writer (“auteur”) Paul Schrader’s 1979 Hardcore. Time warps in twists of magic realism that may be more convenient than magical. Caden retrieves Olive’s diary which she left behind in the move away, for example, when she was not yet 10, breaks into it, and reads it. He breaks into it again and again over the years, and the narrative is updated. It’s where he—and we—learn about Maria, and the tattoos, and more.
Hope Davis has a Teri Garr-like turn as a vacuous celebrity psychotherapist who was Caden’s therapist on her ascent to fame. Michelle Williams disappears into another role as a leading player in Caden’s productions and later his second wife. Dianne Wiest as Ellen Bascomb and Millicent Weems shows up late and proceeds to take god-like control of Caden and the movie itself. Catherine Keener, as usual, is the quiet soul of every scene she occupies—it’s uncanny. But do these parts add up to a greater whole? And is the ever-fuzzy Caden enough of a counterweight to all this talent bearing down on him? I’m not so sure about either.
One of the characters played by Dianne Wiest explains the emptiness of Caden as follows, verbatim (emphasis mine): “Well, Caden Cotard is a man already dead. He, um, lives in a half-world between stasis and antistasis and time is concentrated, chronology confused. Yet, up until recently, he's strived valiantly to make sense of his situation. But now he, um, he's turned to stone.”
I should have mentioned that Synecdoche is set in Schenectady, New York, i.e., upstate, out of the way of the mainstream of the big city, just a tad rinky-dink from the outside looking in, though later Caden uses his grant money to set up in a warehouse in Manhattan. So I understand the “Schenectady” part of the pun but I’m not so sure about “synecdoche,” which Merriam-Webster tells me is “a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa, as in Cleveland won by six runs (meaning ‘Cleveland's baseball team’).” If I may, more and better examples in baseball are “arms” and “bats” for pitchers and hitters. These are synecdoches.
But I’m not sure how it applies here. Is Caden Cotard standing in for the human condition at large? It feels to me much more specifically like the Charlie Kaufman condition, obsessed with death, however comically, and failing at everything even in the midst of spectacular success. The self-hatred is so intense it’s hard to look at directly. Synecdoche, New York is art, sure. It’s a Charlie Kaufman movie. But I know next time I have an inclination to look at one it’s going to be Eternal Sunshine a few more times, or maybe another look at the varying charms of Malkovich. I’m not sure I’m ever coming back to this one.
Then time warps, it becomes harder to follow with clarity or maybe I was just bored with it. There’s a lot of talent here, a lot of little set-piece cameo scenes that can delight with the surprise of recognition. Caden has an affair with the box office ticket-taker, Hazel (Samantha Morton). He can’t offer her much and eventually she moves on, only to return later. Emily Watson—who I have long tended to confuse with Morton (which one was in Punch-Drunk Love? which one was in Breaking the Waves? which one was in Dolores Claiborne?)—Watson plays an actor who is playing Hazel in the grand unified theory of Caden’s masterwork production, which he is spending his grant money on, title still TBD.
Jennifer Jason Leigh as Maria has little screen time, but her character’s impact is felt as Adele’s implied lesbian lover who corrupts Olive. The adult Olive (Robin Weigert) eventually becomes a tattooed stripper at a peep show place. A titanic confrontation with Caden occurs there, reminiscent of George C. Scott’s meltdown in director and writer (“auteur”) Paul Schrader’s 1979 Hardcore. Time warps in twists of magic realism that may be more convenient than magical. Caden retrieves Olive’s diary which she left behind in the move away, for example, when she was not yet 10, breaks into it, and reads it. He breaks into it again and again over the years, and the narrative is updated. It’s where he—and we—learn about Maria, and the tattoos, and more.
Hope Davis has a Teri Garr-like turn as a vacuous celebrity psychotherapist who was Caden’s therapist on her ascent to fame. Michelle Williams disappears into another role as a leading player in Caden’s productions and later his second wife. Dianne Wiest as Ellen Bascomb and Millicent Weems shows up late and proceeds to take god-like control of Caden and the movie itself. Catherine Keener, as usual, is the quiet soul of every scene she occupies—it’s uncanny. But do these parts add up to a greater whole? And is the ever-fuzzy Caden enough of a counterweight to all this talent bearing down on him? I’m not so sure about either.
One of the characters played by Dianne Wiest explains the emptiness of Caden as follows, verbatim (emphasis mine): “Well, Caden Cotard is a man already dead. He, um, lives in a half-world between stasis and antistasis and time is concentrated, chronology confused. Yet, up until recently, he's strived valiantly to make sense of his situation. But now he, um, he's turned to stone.”
I should have mentioned that Synecdoche is set in Schenectady, New York, i.e., upstate, out of the way of the mainstream of the big city, just a tad rinky-dink from the outside looking in, though later Caden uses his grant money to set up in a warehouse in Manhattan. So I understand the “Schenectady” part of the pun but I’m not so sure about “synecdoche,” which Merriam-Webster tells me is “a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa, as in Cleveland won by six runs (meaning ‘Cleveland's baseball team’).” If I may, more and better examples in baseball are “arms” and “bats” for pitchers and hitters. These are synecdoches.
But I’m not sure how it applies here. Is Caden Cotard standing in for the human condition at large? It feels to me much more specifically like the Charlie Kaufman condition, obsessed with death, however comically, and failing at everything even in the midst of spectacular success. The self-hatred is so intense it’s hard to look at directly. Synecdoche, New York is art, sure. It’s a Charlie Kaufman movie. But I know next time I have an inclination to look at one it’s going to be Eternal Sunshine a few more times, or maybe another look at the varying charms of Malkovich. I’m not sure I’m ever coming back to this one.
No comments:
Post a Comment