Synecdoche, New York (2008): A-

Synecdoche, New York
may commence with the drab realism of an Arthur Miller play – such as, say, Death of a Salesman, the production
being staged by perpetually glum regional-theater playwright Caden Cotard
(Philip Seymour Hoffman) – but since this is the directorial debut of mad
genius screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, the film soon reveals its true nature as a
vortex of meta-psychoanalysis that extends outward from its mopey Kaufman-proxy
protagonist to encapsulate humanity at large. An exhilarating authorial confession of
loneliness, regret, misery, fear of death and illness, self-doubt, time, space
and all other concerns under the moon and stars, it’s the story of man wracked
by external pustules and internal maladies. Limited its aims most certainly are
not, a sad-sack fictionalized profile that takes a leap down the rabbit hole
and morphs – like all of Kaufman’s scripts, a point articulated by Caden’s
early, knowing question, “Why do I always make it so complicated?” – into a
morosely self-aware funhouse of foibles, hang-ups and the (potentially futile)
search for comprehension of one’s inherently twisted, contradictory nature
through artistic invention.

Obsessed with decay (his own, his career’s, his marriage’s),
hypochondriac Caden is left by his successful painter wife Adele (a physically
and emotionally disheveled Catherine Keener), who absconds to Berlin with their
daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein). This abandonment is, for the always
glass-half-empty Caden, both a case of worst fears realized and self-fulfilling
prophecy. And almost instantaneously, it instigates a descent into
chronology-obliterating solipsistic madness in which Caden – the beneficiary of
a financially lucrative MacArthur grant – rents a zeppelin-sized warehouse and,
while Adele is away (for a week? A year?) begins staging a play about his life
that grows into a play about everyone’s
life, with the set itself expanding into a miniature metropolis whose buildings
and people are constantly being fictionally duplicated. Starting with Sammy
(the great Tom Noonan), a man who’s been stalking Caden and is then hired to
play him in the show, doppelgängers (and doppelgängers of doppelgängers) soon
proliferate, as do edifices, with warehouses built within warehouses and Caden’s
real-life abodes reconstructed as performance venues, a spiraling sequence of
repetitions akin to the infinite doubling effect produced when two mirrors face
each other.

It’s Kaufman’s uncompromisingly dreary 8 ½, replete with a bevy of romantic interests led by a box office
clerk who lives in a perpetually on-fire house (the winningly flirty Samantha
Morton), a fetching, smitten leading lady (Michelle Williams) as well as, in
the film’s typically head-spinning circular fashion, the actresses hired to play
those women. Scored to Jon Brion’s agonizingly tender musical theme, which
exudes desolate melancholy over things (love, bodies, opportunities) destroyed
by time, Synecdoche, New York – its
titular locale’s name a reference to a thing that stands in for a larger whole
– is a magnificently sprawling puzzle of a Kaufman self-portrait, an uninhibited navel-gazing
work of relentless wry glumness. Yet if the film’s general absence of tonal
modulation and oppressively bleak aesthetic underscore how responsible Spike
Jonze (Being John Malkovich) and
Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind) were for providing prior Kaufman efforts with their light, effervescent
touches, its dour, intricate struggle with issues of identity, art, and
personal/professional satisfaction nonetheless feels like the “brutal truth”
Caden is striving for through his own burgeoning, comprehensive opus.

The same holds true for Hoffman’s performance, a one-note
expression of miasmatic neurosis that begins as a fairly conventional fictional
conceit, but eventually locates an honesty – about lack of certainty, about
confused desire, about the enlivening and deadening consequences of everyday
and artistic narcissism – that’s acutely raw and severe. Synecdoche, New York may be epitomized by an early scene of Caden
intently investigating his own bloody stool, a gaze into an ugly abyss of
anxieties and phobias, and it’s unabashedly indulgent narrative ultimately
leads to nothing less than a (somehow simultaneously literal and figurative)
apocalypse that’s still not enough to
quell its protagonist’s desire for creative self-analytic reinvention. Yet Kaufman’s
meta-meta mind-boggler is, ultimately, far more heady and haunting than
maddeningly egocentric, typified by an elderly Caden’s conversation with a
dying, adult Olive (Robin Weigert), during which her demand that he admit to a
phony homosexual affair lands with an overly scripted thud that’s redeemed,
with piercing poignancy, by the subsequently mournful image of one of her
flower tattoos falling, withered, from her lifeless arm.