Film Review--Synecdoche, New York

Synecdoche, New York
written and directed by Charlie Kaufman
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton, Emily Watson, Diane Wiest, Tom Noonan



Synecdoche: a figure of speech in which the word for part of something is used to mean the whole.

Very few films impact me in such a way that I still feel as if I am in the movie long after the final credits roll. Charlie Kaufman has constructed just such a film and the nightmarish images it evokes are still with me.

This is a tone poem about the many vestiges of mortality. Caden Cotard is a successful playwright who stages classic plays in his little theater. He is not particularly satisfied with the limitations he has placed on himself and longs to make more of a direct impact. Salvation comes in the form of a MacArthur genius grant and he uses some of the money to rent a gigantic warehouse space where he plans to create a lasting piece of work. He hires actors and sets about the business of bringing the production to life. He also begins to suffer a series of ailments that gradually break his body down. The work takes time and Caden is in no hurry to bring his vision into fruition.

Caden has trouble with relationships. As the film opens he is married to internationally lauded miniature artist Adele Lack (Keener). The pair have a lovely, strange daughter named Olive (Sadie Goldstein) but cannot make the marriage work. Later Caden hooks up with Claire (Williams) one of his actresses and they have a daughter together whose name Caden can never remember. There are moments during these sequences where it becomes fair to ask if any of this is actually real. Is it truly happening to Caden or is it all in his head? The film is filled with moments that suggest that we are experiencing the fantasies of a solipsist as several times we see Caden appear on the television in cartoons and on movie posters plastered to telephone poles. He appears to be everywhere at least in his own mind and gradually as he breaks down physically he begins to document his life and hires others to act out various scenarios that he has experienced. Soon, it’s difficult to separate his life from what he is creating for the stage. The play becomes a microcosm of New York as seemingly insignificant moments become the subject of intricate investigations during the seemingly endless rehearsals for the production which becomes more inclusive and vast with each passing day. Caden just can’t come to a place where he can sort it all out and bring it to the stage once and for all. Like all lives, there is no set point where it is safe to unveil the confusions and loathings that plague the mind forcing us to face decidedly uncomfortable truths.

The film shows numerous visits to doctors of various types. We are introduced to several scenes where stool becomes significant. Caden’s body gradually begins to revolt and he becomes an old man long before its time. He is unduly afflicted with a secretary named Hazel (Morton) who at the outset openly lusts after Caden. She is the only one who brings any passion out of him and the film is very much their story both together and apart. The trouble between them is achingly poignant and occasionally painful to endure. They are but two drifters who cannot seem to fully connect and the result is a tragedy of the highest order. Caden searches for meaning and finds nothing at the end but despair and loneliness. He is so painfully anguished and longs to do nothing more than to reveal this state and create a work that it expresses it fully and accurately. Like Antonin Artaud he wants to create a theater of cruelty where emotions are displayed in their brutal, naked truths.

There is a rather warped reality playing throughout this film. There are several instances that are just not quite right and prove to be upsetting to any concept of normative reality. Still, the film maintains enough grounding in what is familiar which only makes it all the more surreal in the end. This is the kind of nightmare that continues to come back night after night. One cannot escape because it forces the afflicted into the realization that it is going to die and there is nothing that can be done about it. It’s exceedingly bleak and this film maintains this perspective for its duration.

This is truly a pitch black comedy filled with little funny moments that rather than offsetting the difficult subject matter only prove to intensify its impact. The idea here is that the only response to acute despair is laughter. But this is a fiercely serious film that tackles every grave horror that the imagination can conjure up. As Caden discovers more afflictions his play expands to contain more and more of his existence. His body gives up just as his production begins to take on more of his soul. There is nothing that can be left out; the minutest detail becomes momentous and worthy of being injected into the coarse flesh of the play. Life as it is lived is the substance of Caden’s art and he insists that everything is accounted for.

Another significant aspect of this film is the gut wrenching agony that comes over a person when they experience profound loss. There is much actual death in this film. Parents die, loved ones succumb. The funeral becomes a touchstone that the film goes back to again and again. Caden loses his daughter when she moves with her mother to Germany. He routinely seeks her out throughout the film and his search is anguishing in its purity. His past perpetually plagues him as his life is laid bare for anyone to pick at and devour. His flesh becomes decayed; pustules form and various afflictions take hold of him rendering him increasingly helpless.

Caden meets a man named Sammy Barnathan (Noonan) who claims to have followed him for twenty years. Sammy knows intimacies about Caden that are both disturbing and illuminating. As fiction and reality blur Sammy takes on Caden’s persona and plays him in the rehearsals. However, he also plays Caden outside the constraints of the play and this proves to be troublesome because he is revealing truths that Caden has been unable to face. Sammy becomes the face of Caden if he could only fight through the terrors that have manifested themselves in his bodily malfunctions.

A sexual failure leads to a series of torments that greatly upset the balance in Caden’s mind. He breaks down and cannot complete the deed. It’s not impotence. It’s a terrifying inability to rationalize the taking of this person who means everything in the world to him. He shudders and careens as acute dysphoria washes over him at the precise moment when he ought to have deserved a moment of fully deserved release. He eventually breaks through but only with an actress portraying the one to whom he would pledge his life. His despair resonates throughout the entire film. It’s heartbreaking in its immediacy and mimics his physical breakdown as he becomes aware of the body’s cold edict of betrayal and the utter permanence of death.

The film articulates the idea that we are all merely actors in a cruelly scripted play in which we must perform regardless of our intentions to remove ourselves from the spectacle. Caden is a man who recognizes this cold fact and is compelled to actualize it in the guise of a monumental theater piece that can only be completed when there is nobody left to perform.

This film can be read as a critique on the modern tendency to record every passing thing and pass it off as significant and necessary to the overall edification of the social order. All of the cameras and video recorders that are employed to document our lives have only resulted in disconnect between what actually happens and what is projected through various media. We seem to live in an age where an event is only considered to be real if it is captured and broadcast for a potential audience of millions. The film asks if there is any legitimate difference between what we experience as waking reality and the dream theater that we perpetuate out of a blinding desire to replicate every nuance of existence. Caden is driven to display every facet of his being, to eviscerate himself so that he can clearly demonstrate that he is actually alive because he clearly senses that he is himself a dying man.

Strangely, Caden insists on avoiding trivial theater by focusing his efforts on creating a work that is consumed with what appear to be trivialities. He states that every person is an actor in their own unique play. There are no trivialities; each action has the potential to trigger both great and disastrous outcomes. A single flick of the wrist might cause a woman to fall headlong down a flight of stairs. A casual remark can lead a person to be apprehended and incarcerated.

Caden sees a therapist named Madeline Gravis who is mighty proud of the scores of self-help books she has written. The film gives us excerpts from these works through voice over narration as Caden attempts to tear through them. At one point Caleb is on a plane reading one of the books and the narrator tells him to look to his right where he sees Madeline. She approaches him seemingly in an effort to seduce him by placing her hand conspicuously on her thigh. Out of frustration she walks away as the narrator plays out the scene and tells Caleb that the book is now finished. He turns the page and it is indeed blank. In the end there are no cheap, glib answers to anyone’s problems. Self-help books perpetrate a sham on anyone foolish enough to buy into their dodgy rhetoric.

The performances in this film are uniformly excellent. Samantha Morton plays both the ravishing sex kitten and the confidant in guises that bring out her ability to fully convey the deeply wounded complexity of her characters. Michelle Williams particularly stands out as the erudite gamine who charms her way into Caden’s arms and bed. Williams is entirely delightful in this role as her bubbly enthusiasm injects a bit of levity into the film. Philip Seymour Hoffman offers a highly conflicted man who is as open as very few characters ever are. His pains, struggles, anguish are all laid bare and it is to Hoffman’s infinite credit that he doesn’t allow his character to succumb to sentimentality. This is one of the great tormented characters in line with Hamlet and Hoffman duly captures the audiences’s heart with his brave performance. Catherine Keener plays a woman who is not particularly anguished over anything whatsoever. Her character has a cast iron alibi and is presented as a true artist who is able to control her subject matter without getting overwhelmed by the fear that she might be leaving something out. Keener captures Adele’s supreme confidence and safety within the confines of her work. Hope Davis is in grand form as the therapist who can’t quite get over herself. She’s captivating and beguiling playing a character who has utterly lost touch with the patients she is supposed to be guiding. Jennifer Jason Leigh has a small role but she embodies Maria’s sprawling lack of boundaries and terrifying lack of propriety.

Overall, this is something of a horror masterpiece. It is looking into the soul and being utterly mortified by what you encounter. The film suggests that the depths of loneliness and despair are unfathomable and that death is the great leveler of all mankind. Life is prone to misfortune and joys are few and passing. It’s a difficult film with many layers but at its core it’s a deeply sad and routinely funny investigation into the infinite struggle mankind must wage against himself in order to obtain even a semblance of peace from all the chatter that otherwise plagues us. Still, the only true salvation comes through intense application of one’s talents to anything that one can bring into the world where once it was not. Art, music, architecture, theater, pornography, etc. are all viable methods of obtaining insight into the heartless beast that is man. Love is proper theater that is elusive and impossible to predict. In many ways this is a film about the incapability of love to live up to its many promises. Life is a tyranny that occasionally offers a respite from its many torments.