Review of Synecdoche, New York (2008) by Gareth R — 22 Feb 2010

When I recently saw Michel Gondry's movie, Be Kind Rewind, I thought that perhaps the director should continue working with people like Charlie Kaufman. On his own, Gondry's whimsical sensibilities tend to overrule logic and common sense, and his films suffer. He needs cynicism in order to work best. Well, something similar is apparently true of Kaufman. Left to his own devices, he is capable only of endless, introspective masturbation. Synecdoche, New York is a film that tries very hard to eat itself, and the experience of watching Kaufman lose the plot for two morbidly overstuffed hours is not a fun one. I felt like I got old and died watching this movie.

Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a miserable playright. (Is there any other kind?) His artist wife (Catherine Keener) leaves him, taking his beloved daughter. He gets a sizeable arts grant and decides to put on a gigantic play inside a cavernous warehouse. It features perhaps hundreds of actors playing out their individual daily miseries - no one, it seems, has a nice story to tell. Caden watches them, hires someone to play himself and his personal assistant, and the rehearsals continue for years. Outside the warehouse, New York becomes wartorn and dangerous for some reason, but this has no effect on his play, which never officially opens.

The symbolism, not to mention the irony, is astounding. We have a vast, impossible project with no discernible relation to or understanding of reality, no aim and no audience. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Synecdoche, New York.

Kaufman has long been obsessed with introspection and facsimiles. In Being John Malkovich, his characters are so sick of themselves they enter other people's minds and bodies. In Adaptation, Nicolas Cage plays Kaufman himself, attempting to write the script for the movie you're watching. In Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Kaufman's disgruntled hero trawls through his own memories. And in Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind - another insufferable sadsack movie - Chuck Barris hates his life so much, he starts writing it down purely to warn other people away from making his mistakes. Synecdoche does the same thing, only on a grander scale. Roughly five people end up playing Caden in some way, until the line between what is real and what is imagined simply vanishes. It would be impressive if it felt like anything more than empty, maniacal navel-gazing.

Caden's actual story is, of course, a miserable one, fraught with illness, loneliness and death. Everyone here is miserable. A bit of narration at the end informs us that life is empty, we are not special, and then we die. Synecdoche is (astoundingly) advertised as a comedy - a "smash hit comedy", no less - and if it is, it is a bad comedy. It's roughly as funny as cancer. Absent is the bleak wit of Being John Malkovich, the eventual optimism of Adaptation and the willingness to keep trying of Eternal Sunshine. Kaufman needs external input, or he winds up simply becoming Caden Cotard, shambling around an empty set after his actors have died, waiting for him to take his collection of miserable observations and aim them somewhere. He's probably aware of the parallel, being a master of self-absorbtion and the shamelessly arrogant assumption that everybody shares his headspace. But that possibility doesn't make Synecdoche any more watchable or bearable, or help to explain how on Earth Kaufman manages to get out of bed in the mornings. My only hope is, having made Synecdoche, he feels he's finally put a cap on this whole Ouroboros fixation of his, and can do something else instead. The movie feels like a final statement in that way, or perhaps more fittingly, the inscription on a headstone.