Synecdoche, New York

(2008)

Directed by

Charlie Kaufman

Review by Terry Plucknett

There are certain movies that, after viewing, you know you just witnessed something brilliant … if you could only understand it.  This is the emotion I felt after viewing Synecdoche, New York.

This complex story was written by the brilliant Charlie Kaufman who gave us such complex and intricate stories as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, and Being John Malkovich.  However, this is the first time he has also worn the directing hat for one of his screenplays.  The story centers around Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a paranoid theatre director who is always afraid he is a day away from death.  A huge supporting cast of characters come in and out of his life throughout the 30 or so years that the film covers.  His wife (Catherine Keener) goes to Germany with their daughter to be a famous artist, the box office girl at the theatre (Samantha Morton) who he always has had a crush on moves into an eternal flaming house, and his therapist (Judy Davis) is always on the verge of flirting with him as she gives him self-help books that make no sense.  Then everything changes when Cotard receives a huge grant to put on an original production.  He decides he wants to do something real and partially biographical to truly delve into a real human experience.  What results is creating an entire set of New York that encompasses every aspect and observation of his life in a warehouse.  Everyone who has been a part of his literal world has an actor portraying them in Cotard’s fictional world.  This includes someone playing him and someone playing the guy who plays him as he shadows him.  His world becomes this master work, so a model of the warehouse and set is made inside of the real warehouse and set, then another made inside that.  Confused yet?  It gets worse, but unfortunately I am unable to explain much beyond that because I am not sure where the story went from there.

This is, by far, the most intricate and complicated of Charlie Kaufman’s stories to date.  It felt less like a Kaufman movie and more like a David Lynch movie due to the pure confusion the story creates.  Leaving the theatre, I felt like I did after viewing David Lynch’s 2006 mind trip Inland Empire, except I was a little more frustrated.  Where David Lynch will confuse you from start to finish so you never think you will be able to understand and just go along for the ride, Synecdoche starts off simple enough for anyone to understand but blows up into something bizarre and confusing that you feel like you should be able to understand but you can’t.  In fact, the story can almost be coherently followed for most of the movie until the last 15 minutes or so when everything you think you know about everything that has happened throughout the movie is all of a sudden put into question.  Knowing Kaufman, there is some deeper meaning.  He likes to play with his audiences, but it is never in vain.  There is something there if you can just understand it.  All this does is make me want to see it again to try and crack the puzzle.

There is something brilliant going on in this movie, but I just don’t know what it is yet.  When I do, I might consider this to be a masterpiece, but for now it is just a fun movie that boggles the mind just thinking about.

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