Writers and journos have this bad habit of seeing something before the public and then writing all about it months before the masses have seen it – leaving them confused and or alienated because they have little context to guide them – and then moving on immediately. In a sense we’ve done this with Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York.” We already written a script review and an “experiential” film review, and sort of moved on but here will try and get down to the nuts and bolts and maybe faithful readers will be able to make sense of it all. At least all three pieces should total up for one real big review/overview.
‘Synecdoche’ is kind of breathtaking and kind of dense at the same time. You’ve probably read the synopsis about 10 trillion times now. It’s about a self-obsessed theater director (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who believes he dying (and kinda is) and embarks on a mission to put on the most ambitious play of his life (or anyone’s life for that matter); a huge, sprawling, self-obsessed work that mirrors his life and is built to scale in an enormous warehouse after he is given the MacArthur genius grant (an award with a seemingly bottomless well of funds behind it). It goes on for like 40-years and essentially is an endless, living, breathing “play” or work of art.
Hoffman’s marriage is for shit and his wife played by Catherine Keener soon packs up and takes their child and art career to Germany where she becomes a world renowned art superstar. Distraught he goes from bed to bed including his theater receptionist who’s always been a flirt (Samantha Morton) to one of his cast members (Michelle Williams) who eventually becomes his wife and bares him another child. The play gets more immense, more ambitious and more dense and soon become a mirror refracting over infinitum and the film is meant to be a deep meditation on the fear of death, losing love and growing old (Tom Noonan plays a stalker who takes on the role of Hoffman in the play because he’s been obsessed with him all his life; the role and performance is to die for – too fucking funny).
But having marinated on ‘Synecdoche,’ for a few weeks now the hazy glow of the experience is sort of gone (we knew we resisted the urge to drop a review for good reason) and while we’re not changing our tune, the resonance of the film has sort of dissipated almost like the ephemeral nature of the films oblique ending which is like a drunken, half-awake dream (PS, if you don’t already know the equation, experience + resonance = great film, and a missing element of that result can never add up to a perfect film).
When we think back on ‘Synedoche,’ and want to get nostalgic (if we can use that word here), we think on its script which is dark, but much funnier. There’s something about those lines being read by real people weeping that makes them way less absurd and much more deep, real and upsetting. ‘Synecdoche’ is sad, almost too melancholy in a sad-sack manner. We also sometimes think Kaufman could still use Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry to color up his sort-of flat visual direction. Some fanciful cinematography might have suited the elliptical nature of the film (Kaufman’s look is almost a shade of drab).
Without being a Debbie Downer on the film, we really do want it to succeed and find an audience, we think it’s really going a lot of younger audiences are going to feel alienated and disappointed with it. It’s surely going to be a tough sell. We’re not throwing it under the bus, see our original review that was pretty winded by the surreal and heady experience, but it’s probably not the best Charlie Kaufman-penned film ever made, either. [B]