Film Review: Charlie Kaufman’s  Synecdoche, New York

 

David Begelman

 

Sometimes it’s better not to heed film critics—including yours truly. If you do, you could wind up puzzling over why they rave about a movie whose alleged virtues escape you. Maybe it’s wiser just to go with your gut feeling before the highbrows convince you you’ve missed something that moviemakers—Charlie Kaufman among them—have delivered. A majority of them, but by no means all, feel the director has crafted a masterpiece in Synecdoche, New York, his directorial debut. For what it’s worth, I think otherwise.

Kaufman at least deserves credit for mounting a project with an important aim. But you need more than grandiose ambition to produce quality. Far from being original, Synecdoche, New York capitalizes on a theme that is distinctively European anyway: blurring the difference between performer and role. The conceit was developed more effectively in film by Frederico Fellini in his 8 ½, and in drama by Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. Mr. Kaufman’s cinematic exercise, despite its worthy intentions, is simply too long, too awkward, and too convoluted to hold up. It hardly deserves a place alongside those other venerable works.

The hero of the film, Caden Cotard (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman), is an aspiring auteur who grumbles about his health throughout the length of the movie. One might say he virtually schleps his way through physical complaints. Well, we get the point about his health concerns; but does Kaufman have to beat a dead horse relentlessly, with no end in sight? The very air around Caden seems suffused with ailments that won’t let up. At the outset of the film, his daughter worries about her green poop, a magazine reads, “attending to your illness,” Harold Pinter just passed away, avian flu was discovered in a turkey, and someone dies at the University of Alabama. Just in case you think illness is restricted to organisms, Caden’s pipes burst and flood a bathroom. Even Caden’s psychotherapist (Hope Davis) is named Madeleine Gravis (as in the autoimmune disease, Myasthenia Gravis?).   

The same sad news seems to infect Caden’s disordered relationships with women, be they his departed wife Adele (Catherine Keener), or dalliances with others like Claire (Michelle Williams), Hazel (Samantha Morton), and Tammy (Emily Watson).

Director Kaufman is, if nothing else, a word game enthusiast. Cotard’s Syndrome, an actual diagnosis, happens to be a severe delusional disorder about being dead, non-existent, or without internal organs. But Caden Cotard’s problem is quite different. It is only hypochondriasis, or a Body Dysmorphic Disorder reinforced by actual dental problems, disorders of the urinary tract, eyes, bones, skin, and mastication. In a section of the film he convulses; in another, he has his head stitched up.  

Caden hails from Schenectady, New York, almost a homonym of the film’s title, while a name on an address directory in the film is “Capgras.” The Capgras Syndrome, another psychiatric—although in all likelihood, neurological—blight is a disorder in which familiar persons are unrecognizable, or seen as “imposters.” So Kaufman, who also wrote the screenplay, supplies suggestive hints about his downbeat hero that exaggerate the reality of his actual condition.

Caden is a director who initially stages a modest production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in his home town, Schenectady. Why he should receive a bountiful MacArthur Foundation grant is anybody’s guess. He goes on to use the award to direct a humongous vehicle, the story of his own life, in a warehouse that occupies a sizable section of lower Manhattan. It seems the MacArthur Foundation folks have gone overboard when it comes to theater subsidy, much the way Charlie Kaufman goes overboard in his unwieldy venture. Like his hero, Kaufman wants to explore “the essence of each being.” Except, it may be conjectured, all over the place.

In Synecdoche, New York, everyone has an incessant pattern. When characters are sad, they are inveterately so; when they recall their misbegotten pasts or longings, they do so remorselessly. The durability of their discontent is the film’s invisible (and irritating) mantra.

As for the theater Caden constructs for the reenactment of his life story, don’t get me started. “Big” is too simplistic a word for the edifice. Even the actor who plays Caden in the movie within the movie, Tom Noonan, is a towering performer who was the original tooth fairy in Manhunter. And if only to drum home the idea of bigness by way of contrast with the miniscule, Caden’s wife Adele is an artist who creates paintings so small, they have to be seen through magnifying glasses! 

Synecdoche, New York takes place over the course of 50 years, while we watch its hero age progressively. The improvised scenes he directs in his magnum opus are a bewildering assortment of vignettes. In them, confusion reigns so supreme, you can’t make head or tail out of the “brutal truth” of characters awash in versions of a slippery reality. Caden’s peroration about the last day of filming, the day he announces he will die, is cut from the same morose cloth. As if to pour salt on wounded sentiment, he adds: “And that day will be the longest day of my life.”

After Synecdoche, New York, I’m for cheering things up with a good old slasher film. The quick demise might be just what the doctor ordered after all the fuss.