syn·ec·do·che Pronunciation[si-nek-duh-kee] –noun Rhetoric. a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part, the special for the general or the general for the special, as in ten sail for ten ships or a Croesus for a rich man.
We will get a chance to see Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” early (we hope) so we’re going to spit out our script review now before it’s too late for us and moot once we’ve seen the film. There’s mild spoilers throughout, but if you’ve read our past work, you know we’re always careful to convey the mood and tenor rather than spoil plot points.
The basic synopsis is this: The film spans the 40 year life of a theater director (played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who ambitiously attempts to put on a play by creating a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse involving all the women who have been apart of his life (Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson and others). Meanwhile, a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his body’s autonomic functions and threatening the completion of his life’s work.
A bit more detail: As you’ve probably read, the story centers around the struggling self-involved theater director Caden Cotard (Hoffman) who’s work is criticized as impersonal by his unsympathetic and seemingly distant wife Adele (bitch du jour Catherine Keenar). They have a precocious four-year-old daughter named Olive (preoccupied with the color of her poop) and their relationship appears strained. Caden can’t seem to please his wife no matter how he tries. Dejected he fancies the ego-stroking advances of Hazel (Samantha Morton), a receptionist who works in the theater he rents out to rehearse his plays. She flirts and while he puts off her advances, he appreciates the warmth, understanding and sympathy she gives him. It’s the first of many women Cotard turns to out of selfishness, loneliness and comfort in the story.
While he’s already beginning to feel off from the beginning of the story, a random shaving accident at home seems to either accelerate or exacerbate his issues and soon he’s off to see an opthamologist (a doctor that studies the the anatomical functions and the treatment of eye disorders). The puzzled doctor can’t seem to find out what’s going wrong with Caden – his eyes aren’t properly dilating – and soon, his anatomical functions seem to start failing one by one. His stool (the color of one’s stool is a constant theme in the movie) turns gray; he grows sores, pustules and lesions; his eyesight begins to fail and he’s constantly suffering some small ailment or another which may or may not relate to the bump on the head he received in his accident.
Convinced he’s dying, Caden begins to mount an ambitious play about life and eventually his own life. He’s not sure exactly what it’s about, but he begins exploring it to obsessive levels, staging it with exact replica sets and character based on his life that grow and grow in detail and scope exponentially through the story. Actors are soon encouraged to not perform, but exist 24-7 within the confines of the ever-increasingly huge and realistic sets and live out their roles. They explore the real-life people they’re based on by staying in character and living among the fake city/gigantic theater warehouse, all the while as Caden and his various assistants take notes. It’s gradually becomes a living, breathing on-going and morphing experience more than a tangible play and it goes on and on and “not finished” for about 40 years. This is where it all gets a little meta, head-trippy, but still really absurd in an extremely funny and Kaufman-esque way.
Claire (Michelle Williams) plays the beautiful star of his untitled play and a person he finds out has been stalking him, Sammy (Tom Noonan), soon takes on the role of Caden in the play (we can’t really do it justice, but the role of Sammy is a laugh-riot of writing and a wonderfully amusingly odd persona).
[Minor Spoilers in the next graph, nothing major, but skip to the following graph if you just want tone and mood]
Adele (Keener) takes Olive off to Germany for an art exhibit (she’s famous in her own right) and eventually never returns with no explanation to Caden (relax, she’s a minor character). A sullen and confused Caden tries to take refuge in women like Claire and Hazel with moderate to minimal success. To go into plot details further than that will probably on serve to confuse rather than spoil, so we’ll leave it at that, but Hope Davis plays Caden’s self-serving therapist Madeline (she’s always pushing her recently published self-help book), Jennifer Jason Leigh plays an assistant to Adele that acts as an interloper between Caden and his family named Maria, Emily Watson plays Tammy, a woman who is cast in the play as Hazel and Dianne Wiest shows up towards the end of the film as housekeeper and the woman who takes the role of the housekeeper in the play (Note: Tilda Swinton was originally cast in the film and now has nothing to do with the film, she seemingly would be perfect for the role of the therapist).
While ‘Synecdoche’ is dreamy and odd – a house that’s perennially on fire is never explained – it’s not entirely confusing. Also it’s wickedly funny in a dark and twisted way; usually at the expense of Seymour-Hoffman’s character.There’s a hilarious little subplot with fictionalized versions of Dakota Fanning and Haley Joel Osment’s live’s 20 years from now that’s pretty much too difficult to explain (now that we think of it, the whole thing is difficult to explain, though not difficult to hang with in read).
While it is abstract, delirious, ambitious, arty and a bunch of other superlatives, it’s not as heady or much more surreal than say “Being John Malkovich” was, or at least, not in the beginning anyhow. Though “Synecdoche, New York” does get progressively weirder as the story evolves and the characters grow older, but it’s not as outright odd as some have suggested (well, at least the script; we haven’t seen the movie yet).
In May, Charlie Kaufman told the Hollywood Reporter, “I was interested in not explaining things, having them just be poetic,” and that’s exactly what the ending of the script is like. Only, it’s actually more confounding and confusing.
As we wrote briefly a few weeks ago, ‘Synecdoche’ is “gloriously funny in that dark and twisted Charlie Kaufman idiosyncratic manner, it’s incredibly melancholy and seemingly autobiographical and its ending is fairly obtuse. We’re hoping in the live execution, the conclusion will be more poetically abstract than flat out confusing, but we’ll have to wait and see.” And this still stands, ‘Synecdoche, will probably live and die by its ending that’s either going to be weird and obtuse for people or going to be surrealistically sublime in a poetic and illuminating manner. It’s hard to say and it could go either way for many audiences. If he can keep it on the keel of “Adaptation” or ‘Malkovich’ it could be fine, but we can see that it does have the potential to go off the rails a little bit. Of note: women seem to find the story rather lugubrious and sad-sack, and while there are elements of that, to us there’s also a lot of incisive and humors self-jabs at man-childness and the inability to grow up.
At it’s worst (or best, depending on your p.o.v.), ‘Synecdoche’ is a hall of mirrors refracting over and over again, a psychological wormhole, a kaleidoscopic prism of metaphysical other worldliness, and a figurative or metaphorical ouroboros – an ancient symbol depicting a snake eating its own tail – as the story not only acts in a circular manner, but it tends to devour itself into an eerie nothingness. But that, we think anyhow, is the point. What we’re trying to say is it just might be an allegory for the dangers of navel-gazing and solipsism. It’s a bit of a self-made nightmare by the conclusion, and that makes sense since it was originally conceived as a personalized horror. Whatever the case may be, reality does blur and bend eventually, but we’re damned if we can’t wait to try and make sense of what it all means.
PS, if you’ve forgotten, Michel Gondry/Paul Thomas Anderson musical mainstay, Jon Brion is composing the score. That itself should be worth the price of admission. The film hits theaters October 24 via Sony Pictures Classics.
