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There’s a bit in The Anatomy of Melancholy about the “madness” common to critics, artists, and philosophers, and by extension anyone who remains so lost in thought or creative action that they’re rarely actually fully present in life. “Is not he mad that draws lines with Archimedes, whilst his house is ransacked and his city besieged, when the whole world is in combustion, or we whilst our souls are in danger … to spend our time in toys, idle questions, and things of no worth?” And then author Robert Burton jumps straight into describing a similar sort of madness: “That lovers are mad, I think no man will deny. To love and be wise, Jupiter himself cannot intend both at once.”
Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, is impeccably acted, inventively designed, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and often devastatingly sad. It was also still such a mystery to me after two viewings that I found it hard to trust my own vocabulary to describe what the experience of watching it is actually like. But Burton, rambling on 400 years before the fact, seems to nail it, or at least part of it: a life where the madness of creativity and the madness of love/lust are constantly exchanged for one another, to the point where pleasure from either is unattainable. But it’s also about the fear of death, the impossibility of romance in the absence of longing, the instinct to project our desires on to others and to seek answers about ourselves in mirror images. In other words, as theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) says of his own life’s work, “It’s about everything.”
The film begins on the first day of fall (as an overheard NPR broadcast informs us in hilariously deadpan spoof of highbrow misery), when Caden and his painter wife Adele (Catherine Keener) are about 40, and their daughter Olive is four. What at first appears to be a single morning soon reveals itself as a seamless montage of flashes of weekday breakfasts. In the middle of one of these mornings, a household accident sends Caden to the emergency room, and begets a chain reaction of doctors visits and bodily decay, through which Caden becomes increasingly conscious that the September through December of his years will essentially serve as a countdown to the final comedown. As his body progressively fails him, Caden becomes ever more obsessed with fossilizing his name, his life, in vehicles that he’s confident will outlast him — first his daughter and then, failing that, his art.
When we enter the picture, Caden’s marriage to the rough-hewn Adele, a painter of miniature portraits, seems to be half dissolved, but that doesn’t absolve the unhappy husband’s guilt over his flirtation with Hazel, the box office girl at the Schenectady theater where he’s mounted a successful rethink of Death of a Salesman. Played by Samatha Morton, Hazel has elements of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (she’s almost supernaturally good-natured, she’s inexplicably adoring of our schlubby hero, she lives in a house where there’s a literal fire that never goes out), but with the typical MPDG’s ethereal agelessness swapped out for a surprising saltiness. Refreshingly, she’s neither the magic key that will save Caden from the harsh realities of a life that would be meaningless without her, nor is she exempt from rules of that harsh reality herself.
But Caden rejects Hazel out of loyalty to Adele, who it turns out, is getting ready to reject him. Whilst packing to move to Berlin, where both she and Olive will find the creative fulfillment that alludes Caden, Adele plays realist: “This whole romantic love thing, it’s just a projection, right?” Small comfort to Caden, who feeds off projections both personal and professional. With his wife and daughter out of the picture and Hazel having temporarily washed her hands of him, Caden takes up with his leading lady Claire (Michelle Williams). Lovely but bland and extremely eager to please, Claire initially seems like the ideal screen for the projection of Caden’s romantic ideals.
Eventually, armed with a Genius grant, Caden embarks on a massive theater piece, set within a replica of Manhattan built inside a warehouse in Brooklyn. Confident in his concept but nebulous on the play’s actual content, Caden directs his ensemble through a never-ending improvisization, into which scenes from his own life are inserted. Claire starts out playing a version of Hazel; then Hazel returns and Claire moves on to playing Claire. Eventually, Hazel and Caden watch from the sidelines as actors playing them move through the sets, directing other actors. Between lady troubles and creative angst, Caden spends the next several decades watching a simulacrum of his life play out before his eyes, oblivious to the chaos and calamity progressively plaguing the real New York (up to and including giant blimps gliding across the night sky and riots in the streets). Day after day, he shuffles around the warehouse, the play eternally in rehearsals, romantic satisfaction permanently just out of reach. Mounting a great piece of art becomes besides the point, as long as the process continues. The day after losing the woman who he’s now realized was his great love, Caden sets to work working their last 24 hours together into his play. “It was the happiest day of my life, and I’ll be able to live it forever,” he insists. Of course, it’s about staving off death, but it’s also about preserving life, opening up memories wide enough to live in them, confirming that both the present and the past happened and aren’t, or weren’t, merely imagined.
Some of Synecdoche’s detractors insist that the film is impossibly convoluted. It’s not, but a first viewing can be mostly devoted to figuring out the specifics of space and time. Kaufman often jumps years ahead in the space of a cut, but this is almost always directly referenced in the script after the fact. If anything, this continual confirmation would seem like a flaw in the script, a transparent funneling of exposition into dialogue, if Caden’s inability to grasp or cope with the unstoppable march of time wasn’t one of the film’s key themes.
There are parts of Synecdoche that are extremely funny, especially in the film’s first half, but in the end this is by far the most despairing project with which Kaufman has ever been involved. If Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind trafficked in a handful of melancholy truisims about human nature, they were mostly to hopeful ends — love conquering all, etc. Synecdoche is a slap in the face to the idea that human connection could triumph over our inevitable ends, and as such, it induces a kind of self-loathing submission. Synecdoche makes you hate yourself for ever being suckered into the belief that art could save, enhance, explicate, or do anything but fundamentally distract and destroy the small shining lights in the average life. And so it’s heartbreaking when Caden continues to hold on to his delusion that his play is the only way to make his life real — and essentially ensures his own obsolescence in the process.
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We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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It is very difficult to conceive of a movie much more complex than synecdoche. Yet, oddly, I have no desire to see it again just so that I might resolve something. Not because I disliked it, but because so many scenes were indelibly imprinted within my mind such that I “get it”. That is, I “get it” as much as can be expected. My first impression as the movie started was that “dialogue” was the entertainment. Actually, for this reason (i.e., dialogue), I would see this movie again. However, because the dialogue heightened my awareness of the same, it became easily perceptible when dialogue began to yield its place to various “prop devices” as the centerpiece of entertainment. I’m not necessarily using the phrase “prop devices” as disapproval because we sometimes present ourselves as silly when we, for example, indicate that such and such should not exist or should be replaced by such and such. In many cases, we would have then simply created “another movie”. In this case, maybe we should make our own movie. That’s when some of us would realize just how difficult it is to actually make one of these things. Some of the devices (literary or cinematographic) used by Kaufman were stunning or spectacular! For example, the “voice” of Adele’s (Cotard’s wife played by Catherine Keener) miniature paintings, and the paintings themselves, were used to great effect. The creation of a “New York within New York” presents very interesting and creative cinematography. The work (make-up, costume, and lighting) performed to create the illusion of aging characters is also very well done. And while the seemingly non-stop, nested twists and turns might make one dizzy, it is just this unexpected variety that provided a journey instead of just another movie. Philip Seymour Hoffman continues to deliver. I found his performance to be communicative and almost accessible to the touch, as one is almost unaware that he is acting. This gives us the feeling that we know him. We then become comfortable with him, and finally empathetic.
This movie comes at you in layers of interwoven humanness. Every message invited the audience to think about themselves, their families, their lives, their legacy, their meaning, and their relationships. Caden Cotard (main character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) was chronically, and strangely ill. There was a scene where Cotard, after receiving permission from his wife Adele, urinated in a sink while his wife and young daughter were both present in the room (present, but not watching). His urine appeared to be mostly blood yet he offered no reaction at all and simply carried on as if the absurd had become the expected. His sickness seemed to symbolize the loneliness that is concomitant with the very individuality necessary in order to qualify as an autonomous human being. If we die alone, are we in fact alone? Of course, this movie is about much more than that. No doubt, most of the criticism of this movie will be that it is far too ambitious. But what do we want? Do we want movies that only fit within our conventional range of pace, dialogue, boundaries, and cinematography? It seems that conventional movies will continue to appear with great frequency so, they will be readily available, but movies like Synecdoche are rare. Nevertheless, there were quite a few things that I did not like. While Phillip Seymour Hoffman very convincingly depicted the kind of leg tremors that might be caused by neuropathy, I found his enactment of a seizure to be so unconvincing that I actually laughed aloud. Interestingly enough, there was a gentleman one row up and about 10 seats to my right, who clearly did not like my idea of “funny”. – Although one got the strong impression that the gentleman expected everyone within 200 feet of him to “synchronize” with his idea of good comedic timing, as he outscored us all with his use of laughter aloud — And that is one of the effects of the complexity of this film; that is, though this film might be easily regarded as “despairing”, there were many funny moments where laughter erupted even while surrounded by loss and brokenness; just like real life. Sometimes, though, brilliance might not be brilliance; sometimes it just might be simple depravity disguised as something intellectual and modern. For example, while I love Tom Noonan’s work in most everything he does, I did not like Kaufman’s wording of his character’s pitch to play Cotard. – Obviously, this “play” is not a real play, but a montage of a construct that represents the mind, fears, and philosophies of Cotard. While I would prefer dialogue that allows for the existence of things like intellectualism, the intelligentsia, modernity, and the avant-garde without requirement for homosexual references, don’t mistake my preference for a suggestion that anything should be changed in this movie. Since Cotard was not homosexual, parts of the movie seem to suggest it par for the course that all men somehow contend with homosexuality. This is not true. This is the movie that Charlie Kaufman wanted to make. No one can say that it should be anything other than what it is. I doubt that any of us will agree on much regarding this movie, as we don’t agree on much regarding life.
If I could only get my 2 hours of my life back. Left before it ended, must have been a trend - cause 5 people left after us!
Save your money and watch.Being John Malevich
Karina, i loved your review! This was a movie that when it was over i sat through all the credits with tears running down my face. I still am not sure whether my tears were in response to the overwhelming sadness of the film or the exquisite beauty of it. This film is obviously Kaufman’s masterpiece, and i believe it was the culmination and completion of the worldview he has been toying with throughout his career. Most of those who bash this movie say they “didn’t get it”, which to me seems to have more to do with them than the film, for though confusion and seeming chaos are used liberally, the film’s themes should come out clear as a bell to those who are actively invested in the film. This is a film where it isn’t about “figuring it out” so you can give a 300-400 word summary/analysis to your friends, it is about knowing something in your soul/heart/spirit that you take with you, something that you can’t and shouldn’t put into words. as Bergman put it
“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”
In this regard i think that Kaufman’s work could go down as one of the epitomes of film, a film that isn’t about reading words and having a mental understanding, but seeing and feeling in our souls. I think art should be a megaphone put up to one’s soul so that it may reverberate through other’s souls.
I would reccomend this film to any and everyone.
i am very sad that Hoffman’s portrayel will be overshadowed by his other film Doubt. this is some of his best.
See that little piece by save you money/time? That’s a good start to a review, not quotes from The anatomy of Melancholy.
great movie, I got much out of it, unlike some of the disbelievers who are too ignorant to even stay till the end of the film…
Just wanted to say I enjoyed you and the other bloggers’ discussion on the DVD. What a great film, thank god for Kaufman!
Excellent movie! OMG does Charlie Kaufman know how to present Life in all it’s bleak beauty. I had to stop at a certain point for a time-out of complete and utter despair, but so glad I kept at it. The ’sermon’ was my ‘high’ point and I really must find that dialogue and relish it again. Beautiful to watch, - (loved the review nail:) ‘despairing’ to feel and I must purchase and watch again when I start to wonder once again….’what was the ‘meaning’ in Life’?? I will recommend it to all those that are not already dead (perhaps to those that are too!).
Very interesting, here is late a slightly different take on the Synecdoche:
http://www.whatisthegrain.com/2009/06/synecdoche-new-york-and-youth/
See what you think.
[...] DVD leider das Gespräch einiger amerikanischer Online-Kritiker über Synecdoche, New York (u.a. Karina Longworth und Glenn Kenny), dafür gibt es aber endlich Untertitel, was dem Verständnis sehr zugute kommen [...]