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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK Charlie Kaufman’s mind is a tangle of ideas, and while he pulled out only a few coherent strands to create the screenplay of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Synecdoche, New York is virtually a dumping ground for the better part of his intellect and neuroses. This wildly ambition film about illness, mortality, loneliness, metaphysics, dreams, and the human condition begins rather tamely. Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a middle-aged suburban theater director with a flailing marriage and an unfulfilling career. His life slowly begins to unravel with a series of physical problems, each lesion and tremor borrowed from an unsettling medical catalog of Kaufman’s imagination. But after his wife Adele (Catherine Keener) leaves for Berlin with their four-year-old daughter, the film’s spiral into surrealism and Caden’s deterioration suddenly accelerate. Dodging a relationship with the doting and effervescent box office attendant Hazel (Samantha Morton), Caden instead gravitates toward Claire (Michelle Williams), a beautiful young actress who idolizes the despondent and absent-minded man, increasingly occupied by the transient nature of his life. In a mad ploy to give his existence meaning and to be remembered, Caden begins orchestrating a colossal play in a huge New York City warehouse. Envisioning a work of brutal honestly, he multiplies the cast to the size of a small city, abandoning a script in favor of daily cue cards telling the actors what happens to their characters that day and letting them live it out. Over a dream-like timeline of passing years, the play grows into a mock New York peopled with doppelgangers of the world beyond, with little hope of ever being staged. The overwhelming scale of Caden’s production parallels the absurdity in the film’s narrative structure. With devilishly clever hair and makeup, the characters glide through what feels like half a century. While the women (represented by a superb ensemble of actresses) grow and change, Caden just retreats into his work and his heartbreak.
Though the film is wildly experimental and gnarled, the humor and its
emotional truths are never obscured. Caden’s relationship with Hazel,
for example, is as simple and touching as if written into a
run-of-the-mill plot driven love story. Perhaps that’s because Kaufman’s
magical metaphors (an ever-burning house, for example) don’t represent
specific philosophical ideas but whims and fancies of an overactive
mind, subject to any and all interpretations.
Yana Litovsky
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