Grumpy, bloated and disheveled, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour-Hoffman) rolls out of bed and into another unsatisfying day as Synecdoche, New York gets under way. Caden is a community theater director and frustrated playwright whose life is settling into the malaise of depression. His wife, a miniature painter played by Catherine Keener (the go-to-gal for unhappy movie wives) is likewise semi-despondent. Sometimes she fantasizes about the death of their four-year-old daughter. The bright hope of marriage and motherhood has faded to dull gunmetal gray. The thrill has gone.
Synecdoche, New York begins as an insightful film about life's accumulation of small annoying details, the clutter of joyless responsibilities, about marriage when intellectual and physical stimulation have abated, leaving a hollow lack of fulfillment, a numbing sensation of failure. It's an effective presentation of the loneliness of modern life.
But since Synecdoche is written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, leaving well enough alone is never an option. Things begin to go bonkers when Caden's box office manager Hazel (Samantha Morton) purchases and lives in a house on fire that is never consumed by flames, even as decades pass. Time and space and the laws of physics are subject to arbitrary dislocations.
Kaufman has always been concerned with metaphysical topics, including creativity (Adaptation), memory (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and identity (Being JohnMalkovich). His scripts incorporate literary references and erudite asides, usually veiled in ironic or spoofing humor. Surrealism is the elastic word usually trotted out in defense of Kaufman's oddball juxtapositions, apparently meaningful cul-de-sacs and brain-teasing blind alleys. For some critics, hanging a term out of art history onto a film provides all the justification the project needs and precludes the application of analysis. If it's surrealist or expressionistic or what have you, it's got to be brilliant, especially if it's inexplicable!
But a little surrealism goes a long way, especially if your ostensible purpose is telling a story. In "The Metamorphosis," Kafka (one of Kaufman's favorite authors) allows the narrator to wake up as a beetle. If Kaufman retold the story, he'd probably transform the mother into a spider, the father into a house fly and the rest of the family into worker ants-just because he can. Adaptation is Kaufman's most successful screenplay because he largely restricts his playing field to dual protagonists-played by a single actor-representing the polar creative opposites of a character called Charlie Kaufman. In Synecdoche, his first effort as a director, no one on the set was willing to shout "Cut!"
Hazel's perpetual house fire might have conveyed something if the film wasn't so crowded by other oddities. After Caden's wife leaves with their daughter for Berlin and he wins a MacArthur grant, the story jumps elliptically between the German capital, Hazel's place in Schenectady (she enjoys an off and on affair with the playwright) and New York City, where Caden spends his grant money on a play impossible to stage. At first the director seems to suffer a nervous breakdown: he sees himself as a character in a kids' cartoon, in TV ads for prescription drugs, as an Internet pop-up pushing his therapist's self-help book. He is covered in scabs and then he's not. He loses track of time. Before long he's an old man and most everyone he knew is dead. Characters come and go, stick figures mostly, too numerous and thin to remember or care about.
Central to Kaufman's concept is the play Caden tries to mount inside a vast glass-roofed warehouse-a project involving nothing less than the restaging of the playwright's life and the recreation of an entire city populated by a cast of thousands, each one an important player. It's Borgesian in its scale of imagination but Borges had the good sense to write short stories, not two-hour films. Caden is shadowed by understudies and stand-ins. Reality and its depiction become hopelessly confused as the protagonist comes to realize that everyone is the star in his or her own play.
One of the best character actors working today, Hoffman is marvelously malleable, bringing the hapless Caden fully to life in all his permutations. His performance is the through-line across Kaufman's messy attempt to say that we all have our own reality and then we die.
