Synecdoche, New York

Plot synopsis:
Theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) finds his life unraveling. Suffering from numerous physical ailments and growing increasingly alienated from his wife, Adele, an artist, he hits bottom when Adele leaves him for a new life in Berlin, taking their four-year-old daughter, Olive, with her.
After the success of his production of Death of a Salesman, Caden unexpectedly receives a MacArthur Fellowship, which gives him the financial means to pursue his artistic interests. He is determined to use it to create an artistic piece of brutal realism and honesty, something into which he can pour his whole self. Gathering an ensemble cast into an enormous warehouse in Manhattan's Theater District, he directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing them to live out their constructed lives. As the mockup inside the warehouse grows increasingly mimetic of the city outside, Caden continues to look for solutions to his personal crises. He is traumatized as he discovers Adele has become a celebrated painter in Berlin and Olive is growing up under the questionable guidance of Adele's friend Maria. After a disastrous fling with Hazel (the woman who works in the box office), he marries Claire, an actress in his cast, and has a daughter with her. Their relationship ultimately fails, and he continues his awkward relationship with Hazel, who is by now married with children and working as his assistant. Meanwhile, an unknown condition is systematically shutting down his autonomic functions one by one.
As the years rapidly pass, the continually expanding warehouse is isolated from the deterioration of the city outside. Caden buries himself ever deeper into his magnum opus, blurring the line between reality and the world of the play by populating the cast and crew with doppelgängers. For instance, Sammy Barnathan is cast in the role of Caden in the play after Sammy reveals that he has been obsessively following Caden for 20 years, while Sammy's lookalike is cast as Sammy. Sammy's interest in Hazel sparks a revival of Caden's relationship with her, leading Sammy to commit suicide.
As he pushes against the limits of his personal and professional relationships, Caden lets an actress take over his role as director and takes on her previous role as Ellen, Adele's custodian. He lives out his days in the model of Adele's apartment under the replacement director's instruction while some unexplained (and likely in-universe) calamity occurs in the warehouse leaving ruins and bodies in its wake. Finally, he prepares for death as he rests his head on the shoulder of an actress who had previously played Ellen's mother, seemingly the only person in the warehouse still alive. As the scene fades to gray, Caden says that now he has an idea of how to do the play when the director's voice in his ear gives him his final cue: "Die."

Tags: comedy, avant garde, depressing, murder, allegory, cult, alternate reality, violence, thought-provoking, insanity, absurd, psychedelic, philosophical

Review:
It's virtually impossible to summarize my feelings on "Synecdoche, New York." This astonishing brain teaser from the mind of Charlie Kaufman affected me deeply, probably more than any film I've yet seen this year.
But watching it is a bracing experience, and it's encouraging to know that there are still filmmakers willing to use film as a means of challenging their audiences and picking at scabs that most people would prefer to remain solidly in place.I can't begin to tell you what "Synecdoche, New York" means, and it wouldn't matter anyway, because I think it will mean different things to different people.
A basic summary goes something like this: Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a morose, depressed theatre director who's convinced that fatal diseases are lurking around every blood vessel, and who decides to stage a monstrous, ambitious theatrical work that will leave him remembered after he dies.
Soon, the work as he's staging it becomes confused with the life he's living, so that he finds himself directing a version of himself through a story that seems to be made up as it moves along.If this sounds like an act of mental masturbation by a pretentious intellectual with too much time on his hands, rest assured: "Synecdoche, New York" is not one of THOSE films.
We pull back in loneliness and fear when faced with things bigger than ourselves rather than turning to those who can actually help, namely the other human beings with whom we share our time on this planet."Synecdoche, New York" will not likely find a big audience, as most people will either not want to work at understanding it or won't like what it has to say.
but it's still unbearable).Over the course of my teenage years I've seen Being John Malkovich through Eternal Sunshine (those two the M-word, masterpieces, with Adaptation and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind near-great, and Human Nature a fun minor work), and he's always given something to chew on for the brain.
To say that either one is flawed may come as something as a given, but for Kaufman it's somewhat more troubling.This is a big film of ideas, crucial, life-affirming (or life-damning) thoughts about love and death and loss and forgiveness and, essentially, the process of trying to recreate and recreate and recreate this.
Like the play that is rehearsed for decades that Cotard never brings to his audience, what can one take away from Synecdoche, New York as far as connecting with the characters, or just Cotard?Maybe it reveals something about me just talking about this; indeed this is probably the film of the season, if not just the year (Dark Knight fanatics take note), that you will want to talk about after it ends.
When Kaufman, as director, makes his film this time about as hopeful as Franz Kafka rewatching the Zapruder film on a loop, even the scenes and moments that *do* feel somewhat powerful emotionally (i.e. Hoffman seeing his daughter in a nudie-booth, or the final scene on the bed with Hoffman and Morton old and in bed with the house, once again, on fire) don't hit their mark - again, at least at first.
Certainly the cast makes it worthwhile to watch: Hoffman is what he is, brilliant at transforming physically as age goes by as Caden Cotard, and at delivering subtle moments of humor amid his health-decay; ditto in her own right to Morton, who ranges from bubbly and lustful to anrgy and dejected (Michelle Williams, too, shows this range); even a bit part by Dianne Wiest is appreciated.
They all help to give life to what is a big, somber meditation on (quoting Douglas Adams) Life, the Universe, and Everything.And yet, expressing my (initial) disappointment over the length (at 124 minutes it feels twice as long) or the music (did Kaufman order "kill-myself-piano-tunes-you'll-love off of ebay for this?) or the personal problem of connecting emotionally with some of the characters as they (intentionally) don't really grow, shouldn't, I hope, diminish recommending Synecdoche, New York for anyone who wants something to challenge them, provoke thought and discourse, to engage and disrupt brainwave patterns.
Rather, it is the apex of Kaufman at his most insightful, his most ambitious, and (as his directorial debut) his most hauntingly beautiful.The plot itself is a contradiction of simplicity and complexity: to say that it is about Philip Seymour Hoffman trying to put on a larger than life play is an accurate statement, yet it completely fails to capture what Synecdoche, New York tries to convey.
Synecdoche, New York is a gamble; a mixture of images and music and dialogue and acting that follows Kaufman's heart and his meditations on several ideas: namely, those on life and death and the connections all around us.
. ."Synecdoche, New York, like the literary term in its title, might stand for all our lives as director Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) attempts a gigantic stage construction of to depict his tumultuous life.
Hamlet 2 it is notit's a serious attempt by cerebral and creative writer Charlie Kaufman to deal with the muses and mistakes of a life worth noticing, in this case where Caden has won a MacArthur.Caden eventually creates a discursive and massive stage play peopled by ex lovers who help him try to gain meaning out of a sometimes bleak Brecht or Beckett landscape.
One of the movies Synecdoche brought to mind for me was Bunuel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" in which two different actresses play the same character with no explanation of any sort offered within the narrative.It's always refreshing to me to see events in movies occur without the writer/director/actors seeming to feel any need to "explain it" to the viewer.
As with (m)any other filmmakers who are genuinely engaged with film as a unique art form, it seems quite clear to me at least that Kaufman requires the spectator to meet him on his own wavelength.This is what a significant portion of artists in any medium do: they take the constraints, conventions, and materials of their chosen form very seriously and explore their own perceptions, ideas, and emotions plying the tools of their medium on their own personal terms.At the opposite end of this artistic spectrum is the sort of pandering manipulation of a Spielberg or the painter Thomas Kincaid.
Their works are only "personal" in the sense that what is most prominently on display in their work is their own desperate personal need to have their intended message "understood" (and even experienced) by all spectators in exactly the same way, so that "the artist" can in turn feel his own personal worth has been validated by public and critical responses - "Hah, I must be a great artist, because I succeeded in making you think and feel the exact thing I wanted you to!" I'll grant that this "spectrum" is a very broad one, and I won't discount the work of anyone along it, but that doesn't mean I have to enjoy things I see as technically accomplished hackwork.
And that's a good thing.On the surface "Synecdoche" is about theater director Caden Cotard (understatedly played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) whose life more and more slips out of his hands and literally rushes by in the film's narrative.
It felt "brutally honest".Set in Schenectady, New York, the film follows Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a neurotic theatre director, as his life disintegrates.
"Synecdoche, New York" feels like the work of a man gripped by fear, grief, and a sense that time is running out.
It follows its protagonist, theater director Caden Cotard, for about forty years of "one bad thing after another." The only good thing that happens to him--he wins a MacArthur Genius Grant--turns out to be a curse in disguise, as he feels he must prove himself worthy of the grant, and spends the rest of his life conceiving and rehearsing a massive theater piece that never opens.
The last part of the movie is a blur of deaths and funerals both real and re-enacted.Philip Seymour Hoffman, perhaps the best sad-sack actor working today, plays Caden.
Hope Davis, in a small role as Caden's therapist, seems to have wandered in from another, less dour Kaufman movie--she'd fit in with the mad scientists of "Eternal Sunshine." For me, the scene that encapsulates "Synecdoche, New York" shows Caden working on his magnum opus late at night.
INITIAL IMPRESSION:This is the film that the Charlie Kaufman from Adaptation wanted to write.In Adaptation he tries to tell his agent, "I don't want to cram in sex or guns or car chases, or characters you know, learning profound life lessons or growing or coming to like each other or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end.
It seems like Caden is just him again inside his own screenplay but unlike Adaptation this one has no change or drama or story and people do not succeed in the end.While in Adaptation Charlie Kaufman gave in to McKee and his twin brother Donald, it seems in Synecdoche he's decided to instead make a work of art his way, period.
If that was the point then fine, but that is about as entertaining as a movie about the glory of watching paint dry.WHO MAY ENJOY IT:There was one theme that stuck out of the whole film that made me feel like this piece was made for the cynics and for those who agree with the sentiments of the main character.
With 'Synecdoche, New York" he goes behind the camera to direct his out there screenplay about a man who wants to make his mark on this world before he dies.I tried to love this film, but just couldn't get past how shallow and depressing it is.
What is going to make this play different though is that it will tell the story of each person living in this pseudo city.Meanwhile, in the real world, Caden struggles with the women in his life: the beautiful but complicated actress Claire (Michelle Williams), his perky assistant Hazel (Samantha Morton), his therapist Madeline (Hope Davis), and Adele's evil sister Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh).
We never connect to Caden because he is such a cold and uncaring character, besides the point in the film where he sees what has become of his daughter from his first marriage.Then things get out of hand when within the replica of New York City, Caden gets actors to play him and Hazel.
But then, Shakespeare never wrote a play consisting of nothing but jokes.Of course, Kaufman the writer has been badly let down by Kaufman the director (although no more or less badly than he was let down by Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry, than whom he is at least no less talented) – so it's hard to say where exactly the fault lies; but while watching this film one comes to the slow and dazed realisation that what it's attempting is humour.For example: Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is raging about his daughter's getting a tattoo at an early age.
Suffice it to say that you probably won't know much more about what is going on in this film at the end than you did at the beginning, but you will be a lot more aggravated.Here's what I think the real point of this movie is: life is precious.
Sort of.This is a tale of how life is, of what we are all doing in this ridiculous dance, of how shared the experience is, of how beautiful the pain is, of where we find ourselves at the end, which is also the middle and the beginning.Told through the disjunctive story of a theater director who thinks he's dying (but then he is, as we are all, no?) and out of ideas, the film goes on a bendy, twisty, story-in-story path -- similar in some ways to a David Lynch film, except here there IS easily gleanable meaning in the twists -- that lets us see an entire life, many entire lives as they interweave and affect each other.A short speech by a preacher at a funeral late in the movie sums up much of what the point is; I won't ruin it except to say that our lives can only be one thing, even though many opportunities present themselves, and it isn't worth sitting around and waiting.Most importantly, I was so deeply moved by this story...
Synecdoche, New York (2008)If you take the events of this movie as seriously as its main character, played with brilliance by Philip Seymour Hoffman, it could be a life changer.
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK is Charlie Kaufman's first film as a director, and his sixth as a screenwriter.
After awhile this film seemed more interested in being like a Russian nesting doll than it did about characters or plot.Now, I'm sure there is some well thought-out meaning behind everything in this movie - meaning only Kaufman himself can fully appreciate.
The humor is balanced out by moments of what I can only describe as pure cinematic poetry, the likes of which I haven't seen since, well, since Kaufman's previous film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.The cast is unbelievable; there are so many great actors in this movie, and they all do an incredible job.
In this arduous just over two seems like four hour tortured artist tale writer, director Charlie Kaufman drags the audience through one of the biggest downers in ages that is merit-less in every way save for the remarkable performance of Seymour Philip Hoffman as the hapless but revered theatre director with a disastrous personal life, Caden Cotard.As in his previous scripts, the brilliant Being John Malkovich, excellent Adaptation and lame Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman plays head games early and often.
when they have too little say, you get Synecdoche, New York.Synecdoche, New York does have all of the weaknesses described by those who hated it.it also has all of the strengths described by those who loved it.personally, there is no way i would miss seeing PSH, Hope Davis, Tom Noonan, Dianne Wiest and an equally superb cast of other players acting their heart out.scenes from this movie will be recurring to me many years from now (especially Hope Davis's role).but, otoh, seeing this film was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, literally as well as figuratively..
After writing brilliant scripts such as "Adaptation" or "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," Charlie Kaufman tries directing and the result is a colossal, self-indulgent mess of a film that cannot engage viewers at an emotional level or make much intellectual sense despite its ambitions.All of Kaufman's earlier themes are here - mind illusions, absurdity of life, fractured unresolved relationships - but this time presented in a boring epic scenario.
He gets a grant that enables him to create a play about his life transforming a large warehouse into a replica of New York but the process become endless as the play and his life became reflections of each other confusing him, the actors, and needless to say the viewers.Although the film attempts to be a meditation on meaningful themes, such as the transitory nature of life and creating art, its two-hour plus length, poorly-edited pace, and convoluted plot turn it into a boring, meaningless experience.
This movie,the first directing attempt by Kaufman left me speechless.For the 120something minutes I was watching with my mouth wide open.It was funny and deep the way only Kaufman is.Philip Seymour Hoffman was simply amazing.What he tried to do in Being John Malkovich and Adaptation,about the tormenting nature of the artist,as he sees him,or as he sees himself,in this movie is, by far, accomplished.Maybe a bit too long but leaves you with a deep feeling and is interesting till the very end.It is more weird, and sometimes too obviously,than all his other movies put together.This first universe created from Kaufman is very promising and still young.Let's hope for more..
So in closing unless you really like a totally art house style movie with no plot what so ever (and that's just my opinion), don't see "Synecdoche, New York" Stick with "Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind or Being John Malkovich, which are truly great Charlie Kaufman movies..
I won't insult the reader by trying to tell what Synecdoche New York is about or what it means--in part because it has so many ideas, comments and interpretations that the more you think on every piece or every aggregate the more you can get from it.I saw this movie in an Art Theater, and my girlfriend and I were initially annoyed by the fact that much of the audience laughed hysterically at moments that were serious.
Although it is not a film that you should watch when you're sad because Synecdoche is probably the saddest and most depressing film I have ever seen it rips you're heart out and makes you swallow it.Charlie Kaufman shows that he is one of the greatest screenwriters of all time delivering maybe his greatest script.
Quite morbid, which the whole movie is.The script is Charlie Kaufman so of course the whole thing flows beautiful, nothing over stayed it's welcome and it moves in a way that is relevant to one of the themes of the movie which is time.Phillip Seymour Hoffman is Brilliant as always, you get to see this man life and I feel like coming out of the movie, you feel like you've lived a life.
Using this stage to play out the "play within the movie" made for a fascinating watch.The director did a good job with Synecdoche, New York but was boring at times.
It's incredibly ambitious stuff and enough of it works to forgive the film for by the end trailing off into a confusing haze.The film tells the story of Caden Cotard, a small town New York theater director whose life is falling apart around him.
Because when he gets a chance to go to New York City to put on a play there...well, let's just say things get as weird as weird can be.Up to the point Caden leaves for the big city the film has been, by Kaufman standards, rather normal.