ScreenWize

A synecdoche is a figure of speech, a close cousin of the metaphor, where a part is used to represent the whole or the whole to represent a part, like when you say “I’m going to the movies” when you are only going to see one particular movie. The characters in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York are engaged in the staging of a play about their own lives. The play’s director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) pulls elements from his own life and that of his actors for the work – the part representing the whole – until the line between actor and person, play and real life, blurs altogether.

Kaufman, already responsible for very clever scripts like Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind attempts to outdo himself here, and in ways that Magritte or Escher could only have dreamed, he has succeeded in creating a work that feeds and loops endlessly upon itself, tirelessly clever and inventive. In the leafy suburb of Schenectady, New York, theatre director Caden Cotard is working on a new staging of Death of a Salesman. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) takes their daughter and leaves him for a career in Germany, and a series of health problems sees him contemplating his own mortality, until he receives notice of a very generous grant to stage a visionary work of his choosing. He uses the money to purchase an enormous abandoned hangar and draws together a cast and crew.

The first hour of Synecdoche, New York is sheer brilliance. The dialogue is acerbic and quotable, especially with Catherine Keener’s wry delivery, and complimented by a series of visual queues and sight gags to keep you always alert and amused. We meet a series of characters each kookier than the next (and with great performances from Michelle Williams, Hope Davis and Samantha Morton) and as Caden’s vision for his play takes shape, so does his life-size replica of the city of New York within his hangar, and there is doubtless an Oscar waiting next year for the art and set designers. I’m searching for another figure of speech, a similie, to describe Kaufman’s screenplay. I want to resort to a cliché and say that it is layered like an onion, but that doesn’t do its complexity justice. Let me instead say it is layered like the politics of the Middle East. However, once again just like the politics of the Middle East, this film ends up a great big mess with no sense of resolution. At some point the complexities fold in on themselves and it confuses more than it entertains. This is disappointing – obviously in his directorial debut, Kaufman needed a producer with a stronger hand and a little more restraint.

CK

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon