SICKLIED O'ER
by Chris Dashiell

Judging by the critical reaction to Charlie Kaufman's first movie as a director, Synecdoche, New York, it looks like this will be one of those films that is underrated when it first comes out, only to gain stature as time goes on. At least that's what I hope. The title, a defiantly absurd pun confusing a figure of speech with a city, has the deadpan quality one would associate with the Kaufman who wrote Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And I use the word "absurd" in pointed fashion here, because Kaufman uses a genuinely absurdist technique in this film, which is a more deliberate match with the picture's purpose, creating a deeper and more complex effect.

To describe Synecdoche's story is to make it seem like a different film than it is, but there's no avoiding the attempt. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays middle-aged playwright and director Caden Cotard, who is staging standard warhorse plays (as the film opens, it's Death of a Salesman) in Schenectady. He’s married to Adele (Catherine Keener), an artist who creates little postage stamp-sized paintings, and they have a 4-year-old daughter, Olive. The depressed and emotionally distant Caden starts to suffer various worrisome ailments that aggravate his already morbid state of mind. Looking for some space, his wife takes their daughter with her to Germany for her art show, leaving Caden behind. In her absence, a young actress named Claire (Michelle Williams) and the theater’s vivacious ticket taker Hazel (Samantha Morton) make advances to Caden that he lacks the nerve to respond to. He then discovers that he’s been awarded a McArthur grant, which he uses by renting a huge abandoned warehouse and launching a vast theater piece, a perpetual work-in-progress encompassing every aspect of life and death.

Time and space seem to collapse as Caden marries and divorces Claire, longs for Adele and Olive, and has an off-and-on relationship with Hazel, who (by the way) lives in a burning house. The years drag on without the play ever opening, while a new group of actors, including Emily Watson and Dianne Wiest, step in to play younger versions of the film’s characters, and as plotlines and people start doubling, it becomes impossible to tell the difference between Caden’s real life and the play about his life.

Kaufman has always demonstrated a fascination with the inherent weirdness of human subjectivity, and it’s tempting to see Synecdoche as a metafictional prank about the artist’s plight as he tries to create a meaningful work of art (similar to the somewhat overrated Adaptation). That’s definitely an element here, but the film’s real theme is something that sounds incredibly abstract--it’s about the thinking voice, the self-talk that is always going on inside our heads, and how this voice creates a tragic and unbridgeable gap between ourselves and the immediacy of our experience. Now, this idea sounds very dry stated plainly like that, but Kaufman doesn’t state it, he shows it, through an endlessly inventive and impeccably edited series of shifting visual and verbal techniques combining the blackest humor with a pervading sense of sadness.

Hoffman, conveying a relentless, closed-in state of interior rumination, is absolutely perfect for the central role of a man who is always thinking about things while avoiding having to deal with them. One of his bizarre ailments, in fact, destroys his ability to cry, so he has to use eye drops to simulate tears. In Kaufman's hands, such a narrative detail is not sentimental or trite, but both grotesque and ridiculous. Hoffman's portrayal of this shambling, passive, cerebral observer makes it impossible to imagine anyone else in the part. It also prompts reviewers to complain that they don't "care enough" about Caden to like the film. "Caring" is a legitimate standard when it's applied to a movie's ideas, I think, but has unfortunately become lazy critical shorthand for not "liking" a character--reflecting the longheld habit of having to "identify" with a protagonist as the hero who is ultimately decent and good, presumably as we'd like to see ourselves. Yet this is one of the very notions that Kaufman is knocking over. Viewing oneself as the dramatic hero is just another thread in the thinker's web--a strategy that keeps us at arm's length from the reality of life.

Kaufman's work with Spike Jonz was overtly comic. Being John
Malkovich riffed on consciousness, role-playing, and celebrity with the glee of a juvenile delinquent spray-painting a statue. Adaptation did the same with ideas about artistic creation and filmmaking methods (and to lesser effect). Eternal Sunshine, directed by Michel Gondry, explored the bonds of memory and romance, and the playfulness was tempered by genuine sadness about the travails of love. Still, it had comic zest, as did Human Nature (also with Gondry) and George Clooney's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. If you are saddled with expectations from these films, Synecdoche might come as a shock. It's a profoundly melancholy film, and its humor serves not as a counterweight to pain, but as a means of underlining it.

The pace is steady and precisely measured, matching the deliberate rhythm of Caden's overly reflective mind. The theme of an ever-evolving artistic creation without closure points directly to the insistent nature of thought itself. Everyone thinks, but the artist's situation is more acute than most, and was thus the right setting for Kaufman's experiment. Late in the film, the metaphor becomes almost literal, as Caden, who has pretended to be Adele's cleaning lady Ellen in order to be in her apartment while she's out, assumes the role of Ellen in the play and is eventually given a mysterious tape recording that he listens to on a walkman, in which Ellen's voice tells him everything to do and say. The thinking voice now guides him as his role becomes that of a living automaton.

The film's significant doublings include Tom Noonan as an obsessed stalker who wins the role of Caden in the play because he's learned everything about him, even how he thinks. The interplay between Hoffman and Noonan takes on the quality of a perversely amusing house of mirrors. Emily Watson shows up as an actress named Tammy who assumes the role of Hazel, and it's something of a cinematic in-joke that Watson in a wig looks almost identical to Samantha Morton's character, as the two actresses could be easily confused with one another to a relatively unfamiliar viewer. In fact it's the first time they've appeared together in a movie, and Morton, who plays the older character here, is ten years younger than Watson. I only remark on such incidentals to point out how Kaufman's mischievous conceits extend even to the casting, and how nevertheless they aid rather than interfere with his purposes.

Indeed, there's a sense in Synecdoche of Kaufman throwing everything into the mix but the proverbial kitchen sink, and in itself it's provided a reason for the film being faulted by critics, as if the first-time director was anxious to include a multitude of his favorite notions in the structure, like an auteur afraid of dying before he gets to make another movie. But excess, in my view, is essential to the concept, and the sheer abundance and audacity of invention helps make the picture what it is. It doesn't seem like showing off or even overexuberance, charges that could be leveled at the work of a fantasist like Terry Gilliam, but disciplined even in its apparent superfluity.

With the exception, for instance, of a few flashbacks that are recognizable as such, Synecdoche is presented chronologically, albeit not objectively, but as a record of a man's inner catastrophe. Time actually seems to stop in the film. Even as Caden discovers that his adult daughter has been seduced by his sister-in-law (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and become a tattooed exotic dancer, it's difficult for him (or the viewer) to believe, since his thought process maintains a feeling of a static now-moment in which everything is present and change seems unreal. I half-expected Caden to wake up at some point and find himself at the beginning of the movie again, but Kaufman isn't playing games. He's committed to portraying the deadly power of the chattering monkey mind, its denial of the body and ability to turn everything into an abstraction.

Even the best and darkest insights are not immune. At a funeral, Caden remarks that there are no extras, that everyone is the main character in his own play, and the thought seems to encapsulate the film's point of view, but then the remark is made two more times by actors playing Caden in rehearsals for a funeral scene. The mind cannot cure the mind, and lived experience continues to stay just out of reach.

Kaufman maintains a tone of measured compassion for the human actors trapped in repetitive strategies and struggles. He reserves his scorn for psychology, personified by Caden and Adele's couples therapist (Hope Davis), whose inane pop psychology bromides take on a life of their own in her best-selling books, which interact with Caden's thoughts as he reads them. A "magical realism" counterpart is little Olive's diary, left behind when she goes to Germany, which continues to record her feelings as she grows up (with a German accent), to Caden's increasing horror as he surreptitiously reads the diary.

You may think the many details I've enumerated constitute spoilers, but once you see Synecdoche, you'll realize they don't. My descriptions can't accurately convey the intriguing texture of this work, which maintains a steady, grieving center while its narrative strands spiral ever outward. While I expect most people to label the picture a "downer" and turn away, I count myself among those who are exhilarated by a film that dares to pose such a despairing question, and with such flair.

©2008 Chris Dashiell
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