Review: Synecdoche, New York

I actually caught this at the Austin Film Festival this week and I'm still on the fence. I feel this is one of those movies where you can't really state your opinion right off the bat. Is the narrative constructive and clear? No. And that will make a lot of people dislike this film. But then again, rarely has any of Kaufman's writing ever followed a contructive and clear path. Granted, this one is probably the strangest he has conceived thus far, but I think it contains merit, regardless of where you place it amongst his oddities.

Really, the biggest pro in this entire movie is Hoffman's performance. He is great with this role and you do share his thoughts and emotions even though both of you aren't too sure what is even really happening.

I felt as a directorial debut, this kind of project was a little over Kaufman's head. He did some great work, but even Spike Jonze would have had a tough one bringing this to screen, but I have a feeling he would have found a way to do so to make this more appealing to those in the general audience.

The movie touches on practically every disappointment and fear a person will have in their life: death, love, sex, children, disease, divorce, adultery, ambition, failure, rejection, fire, being forgotten... The list can go on. And the beautiful thing is, each person will connect with a particular fear or disappointment more than the person sitting next to me. I connected with the fears of disease, love and failure whereas the person next to me connected deeply with ambition, death and fire. Basically, it occurred to me as I was leaving the theater, that Kaufman wasn't try to capture the life of a man within a play, within a play, within a play...but he was actually projecting a mirror to which we begin to see ourselves.

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Charlie Kaufman is one of the most original and innovative screenwriters we have today. If this were a completely linear story (as some people are claiming it ISN'T) then the critics would gladly rip it apart. As it stands, this is a work that has much to offer, and probably merits some re-watching. Considering that people tend to like movies they leave wondering about (b/c they have to think of it more), and considering film teachers love stories that they must deconstruct, this will probably have a huge following given time, no matter what the critics say. Kaufman is in a class all his own, and I am glad to see movies that have different pacing and topics than the typical Hollywood 'this-many-heart-beats-a-minute-hero-girl-villain-superflicks' and 'this-is-a-drama-you-must-see-this-person-act-flicks' (although those have their fun place as well). What's so great about Kaufman is that he can layer deep intricate stories within a more simpler surface one. Most movies are forgettable, but this one is memorable and challenging - I would suggest you see this movie, even if only to jump start your brain.

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You've written a good review and it's evident that you feel a need to give this film the benefit of the doubt. You had one very telling line, however: "one can feel curiously challenged to actually care." The fact that this film never passes the "why should I care?" test is just the beginning of its problems. This is a truly weak film. The fact that tens of millions of dollars and a great deal of creative energy was spent to make it just seems so sad. It is confusing, meandering, and meaningless. To top it all off, the protagonist is annoying. He seems like a whiner and a loser. You call him "sympathetic" in your review, but that is a euphemism for "pathetic". You can read more of my thoughts at http://jonti.org/?p=212 Fair warning: I didn't like it, and judging by the number of people who walked out of the theater where I watched it, I don't think many other people liked it either.

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I am a big Charlie Kaufman fan. I just saw this film last Saturday at the Arclight in Hollywood and Charlie Kaufman was there after the film for a Q & A. I was very excited about this since I first heard a few months back that he was going to direct his own script & as I watched I tried really hard to like it but I can't. Yes, it is a great effort & I understood what he was trying to do but I think he went about it the wrong way. It's his first feature & I think it was a little to ambitious for his first effort. It loses you over & over again. After the movie ended it was pretty akward. It was silent for a few seconds before somebody started clapping. Probably Kaufman's publicist & then everybody started clapping. Two people stood up trying to get the standing ovation thing going but it didn't happen. During the Q & A you can sort of sense that even Charlie Kaufman wasn't really happy with the thing, he kept sort of saying, 'Well it's my first film & it was hard but I got it done' like that was an accomplishment in it's self. I don't want to talk to badly about it because you can't knock the guy for trying something like this. I've heard critics say that Charlie Kaufman is important to film & I agree. I just hope this proved to be a good learning experience. I've heard this line said before & I never really understood it but I'll say it here, 'Only a really talented person could make a movie this bad.'

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"Synecdoche, New York, might be easier to analyze than enjoy, easier to think about than feel."

I actually disagree with this line more than anything else in the review, which I think has its high and low points - much like the film. Another commenter really hit on it, that this film is Kaufman's truly earnest effort to encapsulate everything we fear and fail at in our lives, and it's meant to be a grab-bag for each individual viewer. Arrogant and folly to attempt this? Maybe. Did he succeed entirely? Maybe not, but I'd say that answer truly comes from the individual reactions that a person has to it.

For me, personally, it left me emotionally shattered. Never have I had a film create such a level of personal identification in me. Not because I related to Caden, per se, or any of the other characters. But because I related to the universality of his particular human experience (synecdoche, indeed!). I don't know if I was emotionally moved by Caden, but I was deeply traumatized for what he represents. And while this is atypical from a moviegoing experience, which celebrates specificity, story, character, etc, I think this film is so far outside the lines that people are destined to try to shoe-horn into those particular boxes.

Did I ENJOY the film? No. Can I even recommend it, unqualified, to people? Absolutely not. Did it cause deep personal examination, reflection, and an intense desire to continue to tease out the folds within the film to understand what it reveals to me, about the film, and about myself? Yes. Most definitely.

So does that make it a perfect film? A satisfying one? A likable one? No. But to me, it was art, at its most pure and unfiltered. If it were a painting, it would be a Pollack - everyone is going to get their own thing out of it. To that end, I think it's a triumph.

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It is very difficult to conceive of a movie much more complex than synecdoche. Yet, oddly, I have no desire to see it again just so that I might resolve something. Not because I disliked it, but because so many scenes were indelibly imprinted within my mind such that I “get it”. That is, I “get it” as much as can be expected. My first impression as the movie started was that “dialogue” was the entertainment. Actually, for this reason (i.e., dialogue), I would see this movie again. However, because the dialogue heightened my awareness of the same, it became easily perceptible when dialogue began to yield its place to various “prop devices” as the centerpiece of entertainment. I’m not necessarily using the phrase “prop devices” as disapproval because we sometimes present ourselves as silly when we, for example, indicate that such and such should not exist or should be replaced by such and such. In many cases, we would have then simply created “another movie”. In this case, maybe we should make our own movie. That’s when some of us would realize just how difficult it is to actually make one of these things. Some of the devices (literary or cinematographic) used by Kaufman were stunning or spectacular! For example, the “voice” of Adele’s (Cotard’s wife played by Catherine Keener) miniature paintings, and the paintings themselves, were used to great effect. The creation of a “New York within New York” presents very interesting and creative cinematography. The work (make-up, costume, and lighting) performed to create the illusion of aging characters is also very well done. And while the seemingly non-stop, nested twists and turns might make one dizzy, it is just this unexpected variety that provided a journey instead of just another movie. Philip Seymour Hoffman continues to deliver. I found his performance to be communicative and almost accessible to the touch, as one is almost unaware that he is acting. This gives us the feeling that we know him. We then become comfortable with him, and finally empathetic.

This movie comes at you in layers of interwoven humanness. Every message invited the audience to think about themselves, their families, their lives, their legacy, their meaning, and their relationships. Caden Cotard (main character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) was chronically, and strangely ill. There was a scene where Cotard, after receiving permission from his wife Adele, urinated in a sink while his wife and young daughter were both present in the room (present, but not watching). His urine appeared to be mostly blood yet he offered no reaction at all and simply carried on as if the absurd had become the expected. His sickness seemed to symbolize the loneliness that is concomitant with the very individuality necessary in order to qualify as an autonomous human being. If we die alone, are we in fact alone? Of course, this movie is about much more than that. No doubt, most of the criticism of this movie will be that it is far too ambitious. But what do we want? Do we want movies that only fit within our conventional range of pace, dialogue, boundaries, and cinematography? It seems that conventional movies will continue to appear with great frequency so, they will be readily available, but movies like Synecdoche are rare. Nevertheless, there were quite a few things that I did not like. While Phillip Seymour Hoffman very convincingly depicted the kind of leg tremors that might be caused by neuropathy, I found his enactment of a seizure to be so unconvincing that I actually laughed aloud. Interestingly enough, there was a gentleman one row up and about 10 seats to my right, who clearly did not like my idea of “funny”. – Although one got the strong impression that the gentleman expected everyone within 200 feet of him to “synchronize” with his idea of good comedic timing, as he outscored us all with his use of laughter aloud -- And that is one of the effects of the complexity of this film; that is, though this film might be easily regarded as “despairing”, there were many funny moments where laughter erupted even while surrounded by loss and brokenness; just like real life. Sometimes, though, brilliance might not be brilliance; sometimes it just might be simple depravity disguised as something intellectual and modern. For example, while I love Tom Noonan’s work in most everything he does, I did not like Kaufman’s wording of his character’s pitch to play Cotard. – Obviously, this “play” is not a real play, but a montage of a construct that represents the mind, fears, and philosophies of Cotard. While I would prefer dialogue that allows for the existence of things like intellectualism, the intelligentsia, modernity, and the avant-garde without requirement for homosexual references, don’t mistake my preference for a suggestion that anything should be changed in this movie. Since Cotard was not homosexual, parts of the movie seem to suggest it par for the course that all men somehow contend with homosexuality. This is not true. This is the movie that Charlie Kaufman wanted to make. No one can say that it should be anything other than what it is. I doubt that any of us will agree on much regarding this movie, as we don’t agree on much regarding life.

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It's a noble effort that fails, utterly.

The themes are profound and universal -- the subjective acceleration of time, sex vs. emotional intimacy, an artist's need to find meaning in life while retaining authenticity, the fact that the curtain comes down in the middle of the play (the play of life that is), and, of course, the universality of these existential dilemmas, but as soon as Kaufman strays from a more or less conventional narrative path, there's nothing left that's worth watching in the movie. The conceit is that he uses his McArthur grant to create a synecdoche -- a miniature New York that represents the whole. But in that miniature NY all we see are tiresome replays of his tiresome romantic triangle (quadrangle?), with him aging as we go. In that respect it's like the worst of Woody Allen.

It's a poorly executed rehash of Shakespeare's "all the world's a stage," plus Kubrick's ending scenes in the Space Odyssey, of our astronaut hero accelerating from age to age, plus Allen's neurotic inability to "join a club that would have him as a member" as it relates to the club of desirable women.

I Googled and got a couple of interviews with Hoffman in which he articulates the themes beautifully, and he is, as always, a fine actor. His interviews are worth way more than the movie, philosophically speaking. And philosophy is all you get after the first half hour or so. I'll give Kaufman a few points for a few words at the end -- "No one is watching. And no one ever will." This refers to God of course.

Couldn't agree more.

Some say it bears repeated viewing because "there's too much there to get the first time around."

There's too little there to get the first time around.

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