November 21st, 2008
By Jeff
The Most Baffling Movie of 2008 Has Landed
I am a movie buff and yet, Synecdoche, New York, (pronounced ‘Si-nek-duh-kee’, with an added stress on the ‘nek’) is the first movie I’ve seen in theaters since The Dark Knight back in late July. The fall is usually reserved for the most prestigious of films, but this fall has been a barren, apocalyptic wasteland for the industry. I’ve sat by and watched the leaves turn color and descend as movie after movie was torn to shreds by critics and failed to spark any interest whatsoever with the general movie-going public (save High School Musical 3: Senior Year and Beverly Hills Chihuahua…which really says something about American culture, doesn’t it).
Some might blame the economy on the dip in tickets sold. I personally think that 2007 was such a resounding year, populated with a long string of rich films, that there was nothing left to release in 2008.
Which brings us to an unseasonable mild mid-November and a little known, barely marketed movie known as Synecdoche, New York (a title people will be mispronouncing for years and years to come). It all started back in 2004. Scribe Charlie Kaufman had just won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Eternal Sunshine and the Spotless Mind (and already had an incomparably unique trio of films to his credit, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Human Nature) when he decided it was finally time to try his hands behind the camera. Four years later and now his directorial debut is finally being shown the light of day.
I knew walking into the pitch-black theater that Synecdoche, New York was going to be a dark, depressing, satirical, sardonic, insanely ambitious 2-hour-long wormhole that would suck me up and spit me out over and over again, never allowing me to feel comfortable, never taking me in a straight, safe direction, and refusing on all accounts to allow it’s characters to provide me with a single shamble of sanity.
Word of warning: This movie will frustrate and offend most people. But it also has the ability to enlighten and enrich one’s philosophy on life, and open one up to new ideas on the nature of our species, if seen with an open mind.
For the sake of general plot establishment, the first hour is an absolute laugh riot, introducing us to vulnerable everyman Caden Cotard (the always-great Philip Seymour Hoffman, who has the uncanny ability to churn out three substantial films a year), a struggling community theater director who begins to manifest conditions of radically-declining health (rust-colored urine, pus-marks on face) and starts seeing symbols of his impending death everywhere around him. There is no place he can go, person he can talk to, or TV show he can watch without being reminded of his increasingly fragile mortality.
One day, his unhappy artist wife (Catherine Keener) packs up their four-year daughter for a weeklong art exhibit in London. They never return. The next time Caden sees his daughter is a decade and a half later, at a German peepshow. Despite that, somehow Caden manages to win a MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant and decides his purpose in life is to create a wholly-original play about the small but important details that are overlooked in everyday life. The next numerous decades are spent hiring and directing hundreds of actors and stage crew to fine-tuning his ‘masterpiece.’
Synecdoche, New York must have one of the best female casts ever assembled. Philip Seymour Hoffman has been given the lone male role (aside from a brief but crucial role played by the talented Tom Noonan as a drifter who’s been stalking Caden around for the past 20 year without him knowing). There is not one female character NOT being played by an A-list actress. There’s Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Emily Watson and Dianne Wiest. The fact that Hoffman’s character is such an un-repairable mess, physically and mentally, and yet is still able to have sex with 85% of these women really gives me hope.
I wasn’t expecting there to be anybody in the theater since the movie had opened two weeks prior, I hadn’t seen a single television or internet ad, and the new James Bond movie was just released the day before to record-breaking sales for the spy franchise. To my surprise, the theater was packed with senior citizens (which I’d no doubt attribute to the fact that these geezers saw Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Oscar-winning performance as Truman Capote and decided he was a ‘grand-standing fellow who would only appear in respectable film projects’). I wish I could have used a megaphone to issue a precaution to them before the movie started, informing them what exactly they were getting themselves into.
Heck, after the first 10 minutes my own friend, who has quite a tolerance for the bizarre, turned to me and asked, “Just what in the hell have you gotten me into?”
Despite the unrepressingly bleak tone, there was much laughter from the audience all throughout the film, as death and comedy often go hand-in-hand, otherwise we could never cope with the harsh reality of it.
I’d like to think that most people understood the straightforward message that movie was trying to deliver about the inevitability of death and how simply living in the moment is the most worthwhile lesson we can strive to follow. I want to believe that at least a handful of viewers were picking up on the more cryptic messages residing in the film.
However, I can only imagine the lingering feelings of despair, denial and sheer loneliness that a majority of those older folks must have been experiencing as they hobbled out of the theater on their one good leg.
I am not ashamed to admit that I really enjoyed the experience this one-of-a-kind movie offered to me. Synecdoche, New York is a complete breath of fresh air, an undeniable work of ‘art’ rather than ‘entertainment.’ Although if I had to sit through it again anytime soon, I would probably need some razor blades or a capsule of cyanide.
* If I’ve actually peaked anyone’s interest in this film, check out writer/director Charlie Kaufman’s interview by Filmmaker Magazine on the following page:
http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/fall2008/synecdoche.php
Leave a Reply