Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Being John Malkovich”) latest oeuvre is, assuredly, one of the greatest motion pictures of the decade (a consciously grandiose statement that echoes the nature of the film).
“Synecdoche, New York,” the veteran writer’s directorial debut, is in some respects a sprawling surrealist epic, and in other respects an intimate, realist character study. The film defies convention and precludes definition.
Philip Seymour Hoffman effortlessly delivers a scintillating performance as the neurotic, hypochondriac theater director, Caden Cotard. His pessimism and obsession with mortality overwhelm his wife (Catherine Keener) and drive her and his daughter from their home in upstate New York to Berlin, where she becomes an internationally acclaimed painter. In the wake of his family’s departure he receives a genius grant from the MacArthur foundation. With his newly endowed MacArthur fellowship, he endeavors to construct a life-size replica of Manhattan inside an abandoned warehouse, in which he will stage his new play.
Summarizing the film is a near impossible task. Communicating the brilliance of this film using language as it is known to man seems to be outside the realm of possibility. The movie grapples with the metaphysics of humanity in an unprecedented fashion. One’s senses cannot help but be overwhelmed by the ethereal imagery of this film.
“Synecdoche’s” meditations on mortality and its relation to how we live our lives are beautifully depicted by Frederick Elmes’ virtuosic cinematography. Very rarely can the imagery of a film be translated into such beauteous poetry.
Kaufman’s script attains a perfect stasis between the surreal and the real. The film, in actuality, marries the antithetical conceptions of being to create a definitive, dream-like reality. Kaufman is emphatic that the actions on the screen are, in fact, reality. Nothing is a dream, however strange or fantastical it may be, the images on the screen are real to the characters.
As Caden descends into madness the plot ascends to beautiful chaos. His mind becomes increasingly muddled and the plot correspondingly becomes increasingly convoluted. One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the irrelevance of time. Caden cannot seem to grasp the concept of time and it is reflected in the play within the play within the play within the movie. Caden is perpetually fearful of death, consequently he stagnates, as an artist and a human, whilst the rest of civilization propels itself forward.
However, time may be progressing chronologically, but the peripheral imagery suggests an apocalyptic future marked by mankind’s devolution.
Caden is blind to the deterioration of civilization because his fear of death has left him in an atypical state of emotional paralysis, not to be confused with a lack of emotion. Caden is afflicted with profound melancholia of varying degrees, but he does not even begin to know how to reconcile his depression, hence, he plunges himself deeper into his work and further from an understanding of its significance.
Many will find the film sluggish and inaccessible, but the patient will appreciate what it has to say about the mortality of man and our collective refusal to acknowledge that “the continuous work of our life is to build to death.”