Day 9: Synecdoche, New York

[A much shorter version of this should soon appear at The House Next Door. This is the expanded version I wrote for my class here in Cannes. It may be a little muddled, but I think it better gets at what makes the film at once so challenging and so rewarding.]

A struggling puppeteer finds a portal in an office building that leads into the mind of actor John Malkovich. A screenwriter is hired to adapt a non-fiction book but suffers crippling writer’s block and decides to write a movie about himself attempting to adapt the book but instead writing a movie about himself. Two ex-lovers experiment with a scientific process to erase their memories of each other. Such are the concepts behind the strange and brilliant cinema of Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Yet no matter how extreme these ideas are, no matter how inventive and ambitious, they have now, against all odds, been topped.

It doesn’t matter what you’ve read or heard about Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman’s directorial debut, because nothing could possibly prepare you for the experience of actually sitting through the film. It is easily Kaufman’s most ambitious project, which also means that it is one of the most ambitious films I’ve ever seen. The role of the artist in society; coming to terms with death, God and fate; and the importance of escaping from the trap of solipsism in order to connect with others are among the most prominent themes, but they are far from the only ones. The sheer depth and complexity of the ideas Kaufman is out to explore here is mind-boggling.

Obviously, Synecdoche, New York is not an easy film, or a clean one. The first twenty minutes or so are relatively straightforward, as they detail the day-to-day lives of a theatre director named Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in a performance of incredible range and emotion) and his wife Adele living in Schenectady, New York. When Caden’s health begins to deteriorate in strange and grotesque ways, Adele (Catherine Keener) takes his daughter to Berlin for a week-long trip. They never come home, and as the film becomes increasingly focused on Caden’s mental state, things like temporal and narrative cohesion start to fall to the wayside.

It quickly becomes clear that everything that happens in Synecdoche, New York must be seen as filtered through Caden’s psyche. When Adele leaves, he makes an abortive attempt at a relationship with Hazel (Samantha Morton), the box-office worker at his theater, before marrying Lucy (Michelle Williams), the lead actress from his Death of a Salesman production. He then receives a MacArthur genius grant and sets out to create the most “true” theatre piece of all time. He commissions the construction of a model of Schenectady in a huge warehouse and hires actors to portray the everyday activities of the city’s inhabitants.

The idea is to reproduce real life as theatre, but Caden’s life soon begins to invade the production. Actors are hired to play Hazel, Lucy, and even Caden himself. Events that occur in the real world, such as Lucy leaving Caden or two of the actors falling in love, are recreated for the play. For Caden, the play is less an artistic statement and more an opportunity for him to escape from the real world into his own mind. The play allows Caden to infinitely repeat the events of his life, in an attempt to analyze where he may have gone wrong. Furthermore, it seems that Caden hopes that, by receding into himself, he may be able to avoid death.

Death is a prominent issue in Synecdoche, New York from the very beginning. The opening credit sequence plays over a song sung by a young girl about how she will “live and die in Schenectady” (the song is repeated over the end credits, only this time sung by an adult, emphasizing the cycles of life at play throughout the film). The play Caden is directing as the film begins is a restaging of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman with the two leads played by young actors. “The tragedy,” Caden says to his lead actor, “is that you, as a young actor, think you can escape your character’s death. But the audience knows you cannot.” Signals of Caden’s fear of his own mortality begin to appear everywhere; his various illnesses seem to be manifestations of this fear more than actual infirmities (they disappear and change from scene to scene and never have any impact on Caden beyond the mental). An animated program Caden’s daughter watches begins playing songs about viruses and mad cow disease, and on several occasions an animated facsimile of Caden appears on the program.

As the film continues, all sense of structured time begins to fall apart. Years pass over the course of several scenes. Caden begins the film in middle-age and ends it an old man. And all the while, his play grows more and more circular and self-consuming. The execution of the play itself becomes part of the play. Actors are hired to play other actors. They quit the play and they die, and all the while Caden stands behind the scenes as a self-absorbed God, too consumed by his product to realize that he has lost all connection with the outside world.

In this sense, Synecdoche, New York functions as an examination of the artist’s role in society. Although this is his first film as director, Kaufman has long been treated by the film community as an auteur. Films like Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are referred to as “Charlie Kaufman films” rather than as the property of their directors. This is a testament to Kaufman’s wholly unique sensibility, but it also explains how Caden can be seen as a representation of Kaufman the artist, and how Synecdoche, New York can be seen as Kaufman dealing with his own doubts about his job. It took eight films before Frederico Fellini examined himself as auteur with 8 ½; Bob Fosse only took two before All That Jazz. Kaufman has done it his first time at bat.

For this reason, Synecdoche, New York can be a self-involved film, but it also an intensely self-critical one. Caden, although our only point of entry into the film, is frequently a tragic and pathetic character. On several occasions, Kaufman has characters call Caden out on his solipsism, most importantly the actor Caden hires to play himself. A scene where a funeral is recreated for the play features an impassioned plea from a priest to pay attention to the stories every person has to tell. At these moments, the sincerity and broad humanism of Kaufman’s vision is almost unbearably moving. They have an effect on Caden, as well. Eventually, he hands off his role as director to another actor and takes on the role of an elderly female maid. He lives awhile as this woman, seeing her fears, doubts and regrets—her story—and in this knowledge at last finds happiness and transcendence.

In its narrative structure, based as it is around repetition, dream logic, circularity, questions of identity and the importance of art, Synecdoche, New York at times recalls David Lynch’s Inland Empire. Like Lynch’s brilliant fever-dream, Kaufman’s film seems destined for heavily mixed responses. Many will hate it. Those who love it will do so fully, passionately. Several days ago, I myself was unsure of my own reaction to the film, except to say that, out of all the films I saw at the Cannes Film Festival, none felt this immediate, this involved in exploring all the complexities of life, this, for lack of a better word, important. I now feel comfortable proclaiming it a work of messy genius and of great artistic scope. It is much too complex a film to fully grasp after a single viewing, but right now, with the hustle and bustle of the festival behind me, I think it’s some sort of masterpiece.