Review of Synecdoche, New York (2008) by Stephen E — 03 Dec 2011

It's a masterpiece that hurts the soul of its viewers.

Pulling the viewer into the world it creates... what greater success can a movie aspire to?

But does it have to be this one?

While the writing, the acting, the production etc. are imho all absolutely top notch and deserving of the highest praise, my problems are with the effect the result as a whole has on the people who spend the time of their own lives seeing it.

We find ourselves in the second half of the life of theater director Caden Cotard. We follow his fate through losses, tragedies, a gradual but inevitable bodily decay and an increasing sense of hopelessness toward the meaning of life in general. A very serious and sad man indeed. The emotional developments depicted are positively indigestible.

At a pivotal moment two thirds into the film, a priest makes an appearance, ending a staged funeral sermon with the words:

"Fuck everybody, Amen". (A scene occuring within the self-referential stage play Caden is working on).

By then, we are already there, tagging along with the tragedy of this self-centered main character and all the omnipresent, permanent and constant pain of existence he experiences.

The depth and detail of imagination that Kaufman exposes in his script boggle the mind. To appreciate all of it, the movie needs to be seen several times, so dense and fast is it that this tragedy unfolds.

Through this and the unfolding of its entrancing encapsulation of realities-within-realities it succeeds in wearing any resistive strategy the viewer might bring up against this very bleak view of existence.

The effect this has, the danger it harbors, is that it in effect "excaspulates" this bleak reality into the psychlogical reality of the viewer, into the way the audience will see the world once the film has ended:

The potential to generate persistent feelings of existential solitude and depression are at least on par with Franz Kafka's "Das Schloss" and "The Trial":

All this "happiness in life" was just all a lie.

Reality is completely fu#$%! :|.

It is a deep immersion into a troubled and disturbed mindset, that is actually quite hard to escape from - an escape that can operate only through the darkest of humors.

I'm still not fully over it, not completely recovered.

Movies like this need to come with a warning label.

Definitely not what I expected after chuckling my way through "Being John Malkovich" and feeling gently touched by the melancholic quirkiness of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind".