Review of Synecdoche, New York (2008) by Srijata C — 08 Mar 2010

A day in the life of a dysfunctional middle-class family can only be as normal as you choose to believe. For probably it is the â??normalâ?? people, struggling to lead mundane, planned lives in the face of all adversity, are the ones who have the most intriguing lives. There is nothing glamorous about the lives of the characters in Synecdoche, periodically disillusioned, periodically fooled into hope. The only glamour, in the glitzy pages of fashion magazines, wears off when the father stands in front of the nude tattooed model, screaming out to his daughter, desperate to regain the old pieces of himself which kept him alive.

The protagonist is Caden Cotard, a theatre director tumbling unceremoniously into middle age. Each day passes by before heâ??s fully alive to it; each day brings news of approaching death. Each day brings a new ailment that cripples him. Every day for him is a race against death. And yet death advances.

Initially, Caden is just Caden - just like any common man, looking back at lost opportunities and undeserved suffering and screaming, â??Where the hell did I go wrong? It was everyone elseâ??s fault!â?? To avenge the wrongs done to him, he decides to mount a huge play, a â??brutal, uncompromisingâ?? play, detailing every single act of betrayal in his life. But where the distinct, disturbed character Caden gradually melts off into Ellen the housemaid, Sammy the stalker and Millicent Weems the determined dominatrix, is impossible to see.

The play is never complete; neither is his life. As he obsessively inserts every single detail into the play, engaging actors to play a second himself, a second Hazel, a second Claire, then another replacement for the second Caden, he forgets which is his life and which is the life heâ??s directing. It is as if the play is his justification to himself and a higher God for all the opportunities missed. In that constant race for justifying the past, he forgets that thereâ??s a present he must live for.

In the end, heâ??s kicked off his own role in his own life, and relegated to a cleaning maid. The last 30 minutes are some of the most powerful moments of cinema Iâ??ve ever seen. The film weaves in and out of a psyche too complex to dwelve into, all the while detaching the connections to reality.

Once, Cotard proclaimed in a locker room, â??We're all hurtling towards death. Yet here we are, for the moment, alive, each of us knowing we're gonna die, each of us secretly believing we won't.â??

That was probably truer of him than anyone else. Like all of us who believe the tougher things happen to â??someone elseâ??, he hoped against hope that heâ??d survive. But he was never alive; he was dead even before the movie began. He was afraid of death. And that killed him long before the command came â?? â??Die.â??

The tragedy is that, like all of us, he believed a â??safeâ?? life and a constant vigilance for death would ever do any good. It never did. It never does.

This is, then, not just a story of a middle aged Caden Cotard, unsuccessful theatre director. This is the story of every one of us. This is the story that reminds us, Hell is a reality and it can be our own bedrooms.