Synecdoche, New York
Review by Alissa Wilkinson | posted 10/24/2008
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Synecdoche, New York is comically difficult to summarize (and pronounce), but here goes: Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who may or may not be a hypochondriac, is a small-time theater director lives in Schenectady, New York (a small, slowly dying city near my hometown, three hours north of New York City) with his wife, Adele (Catherine Keener), who has attained some fame as a painter of tiny canvases. Cotard directs at a local theater, where he and the receptionist, Hazel (Samantha Morton), flirt on smoking breaks. In the midst of rehearsals for Death of a Salesman, Cotard's body starts acting up on him. Strange afflictions plague him, but soldiering on toward his artistic vision, he produces the play, which everyone loves but Adele.
Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard
Then, one day, Adele decides that Cotard shouldn't come on the family's long-planned Berlin trip for her exhibition. Taking their daughter with her, she leaves—and never comes back. Cotard's world begins to blur, and time elasticizes until he is suddenly awarded a MacArthur Genius grant, and with some regained passion he moves the company, along with his new wife (Michelle Williams) and daughter to New York City. He plans to create a grand, experience-encompassing "theater of the real," which will explore everyday moments in his own life by re-enacting them. He'll create the most real theater—ever—that will face the truth head-on: the truth about his failed relationships with Adele and Hazel, his estranged daughter, and his own afflictions.
Cotard locates a cavernous warehouse in downtown Manhattan and moves the production in to begin rehearsals. By now he's aging rapidly and fully collapsed into himself; his work turns into a colossal navel-gazing session, with everyone in the production playing parts in his life. The production moves ponderously on for decades while Cotard struggles to find the answers to what went wrong in the life he's all but abandoned. The warehouse-world becomes a hall of mirrors—art reflecting life reflecting art, until the lines are thoroughly smudged—and Cotard's "life" is bewilderingly confused with his work.
Samantha Morton as Hazel
Make no mistake: Synecdoche starts out plausibly enough, but by the end it has completely (and purposefully) veered off into fairy-tale territory. At this point in his career, writer/director Charlie Kaufman could be called the founder, or at least the patriarch, of a cinematic brand of naturalistic surrealism. This is his directorial debut, but he's best known for writing brain-benders Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, and Being John Malkovich. Kaufman has a unique voice in today's cinema. He can take a twisted premise that only occasionally dovetails with the real world and still somehow strike a chord in the audience's consciousness.
The makeup and art departments deserve a medal of some sort; Hoffman, Morton, Williams, and myriad others transform before our eyes into what could very well be the seventy-year-old versions of themselves. The film's sense of time is appropriately preposterous. Decades pass without any explanation. Some people age, and others don't. Eventually it becomes apparent that we're witnessing some amalgamation of actual events in Cotard's life, filtered through a consciousness that's bogged down in old memories.
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