I just got a copy of 2666 from the library, and should be starting in on it, but I wanted to at least throw a few words down about Charlie Kaufman’s latest.
First off, the cast. Philip Seymour Hoffman has to have the best homerun average in the game right now. Though I wish he’d get roles a little closer to Talented Mr. Ripley than the usual depressed shlub, this shlub is every bit as great as this guy or the guy from Happiness. Hoffman’s the center, but there’s a huge number of first-rate female performances here: Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis – and then showing up late and re-igniting the whole movie again – Dianne Wiest and Emily Watson. This can be a frustrating movie I guess. Time is screwy, sores ooze, injuries mental, physical, psychological and self-inflicted are heaped on to a man who is so predestined for failure that his award of a MacArthur Genius Grant is almost summarily ignored by everyone.
But I’ll let Manohla and Roger say a little:
NY Times’ first line:
To say that Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York†is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now.
I think you have to see Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” twice. I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film and that I had not mastered it. The second time because I needed to. The third time because I will want to. It will open to confused audiences and live indefinitely.
Having only seen it once, I can’t claim to get it all (I’ve actually learned quite a bit I missed by reading some of the better reviews after seeing it), but I can at least tell you some of the reasons I loved it.
I’m assuming most of you have at least seen the trailer, which gives away a lot of the plot, but manages not to ruin much anyway. Hoffman’s character, Caden, abandoned by his family, but flush with MacArthur bucks, ends up no longer living his life but creating a “true” theatrical depiction of it in a huge NYC warehouse.
The characters in his life get cast, then the play itself – and the actors – end up in the play, so the more actors get cast portraying the actors in the play… A house is sold that is slowly burning, and when the buyer expresses some anxiety about buying the house b/c she will die in the fire, the real estate agent replies, “Well, deciding how you die is a very important decision.”
Bits of fat-out surrealism pop up, like the burning house and some sort of huge societal breakdown takes place (or a war or terrorist event or martial law, who knows?). Cotard’s spiral downward has him sneaking into his wife’s apt to clean it, casting a woman as the cleaning lady in the play version, then having her eventually play him while he ends up playing the cleaning lady. And all this in two hours!
Jon Brion’s music may not hit the perfect synthesis of melancholy and joy that his score for Eternal Sunshine did, but it’s still wonderfully evocative without being manipulative.
This is as weirdly wonderful as Being John Malkovich, and depressing as it may be, I at least left the theater invigorated and happy to be alive. And speaking of Malkovich, there was actually a funny SNL sketch on the other night with him.
Great review. This is among now a small list of films I feel keen to see, and hopefully can, once things calm down at school…
This movie is fantastic! Thanks, Mauer. For about an hour the film seems to be an extended exercise in surrealistic paranoia (coupled with a heavy dose of existential anguish). It’s clever and entertaining, but also solipsistic and narcissitic (I felt myself getting lost in the AGONY of the artist minus the ecstacy); yet in the final half hour or so the film transforms into something truly visionary and moving, inspiring even. Recuperating thematic elements from The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the narrative focuses in on a beautiful love story only to rise above even that to achieve something akin to a celebration of the human spirit in all its failings and all its glories. Even typing those words feels corny, but Synecodoche, New York captured something about the loneliness and the necessity of life that I have never seen on the screen before. The last twenty seconds or so were transcendent.
Glad you liked it. Re-reading my review, I notice I totally failed to capture any of the feeling that this movie possesses and instills in the audience.
Frankly, I think Ebert’s review best describes it and puts it in context to Kaufman’s increasingly staggering body of work.
I heard Hoffman on Terry Gross’ show yesterday and it was all about the dour, boring looking Doubt. Not a word about this movie, which is really too bad.
Well, he is on a promotional tour, and the film recently got a much needed lifeline as it picked up a few Golden Globe nods yesterday (I really can’t imagine anyone wanting to see that thing). I know I won’t be able to sit through it, but I’m still reeling from Synecdoche. Man, I felt like the film was talking right at me. I even went and found the soundtrack, which is excellent.
Additional reason to bump Synecdoche up on your Netflix queue.
I’m glad I watched this, though I don’t think I got as much out of it as Mauer and Jeff. Perhaps that is because I have only watched it once, but I’m reluctant to allow a movie to expect multiple viewings as the price of getting it. It really is a technical tour de force, especially as it picks up steam and the casting of the play within the play becomes ever more complicated. As Mauer notes, when was the last time you saw this many superb females actors populate a film? And I agree with Jeff that the last twenty minutes and especially the last couple as Hoffman tours the devastated, seemingly war-torn lot, are deeply poignant.
But why? As an exercise in surrealism, I think I get it. But as an extended contemplation on death and loneliness (and I think loneliness is the bigger issue for the Hoffman character), it felt bloated, self-indulgent and manipulative. I still, for the life of me, cannot understand why I am supposed to care about Caden, why I am expected to (and do!) celebrate his final release. He is utterly passive and self-absorbed. He appears to ruin the lives of Adele, Hazel and Claire, and yet the play goes on around him, a metaphor for an entire world revolving around the self-absorption of a man whose physical decay comes to match the total inability to make an emotional move.
This is one of those movies with marvelous parts (every moment with Tom Noonan, most of them with Samantha Morton) but which, for me at least, added up to less than the sum of those parts. At the risk of sounding populist (Limbaugh?!) this seemed like a movie made more for film critics than movie goers.
My copy is in the mail, but I am looking forward to a second viewing. All films require at least two viewings in my humble opinion.
I agree with Jeff. Hard Ticket to Hawaii rewards the truly invested film viewer, as I’d missed many of the boobies the first time through.
I’ve got Synecdoche sitting here, along with Rachel Getting Married, but instead I went to see Watchmen last night, and should probably post on it, but it pretty much sucked out most of my energy. There are some other things I’d note, too, when I get around to it. A decent little two-hander called Real Time, better than you’d expect, and the first couple episodes of AMC’s Breaking Bad, which is as good as most everyone says.
Jeff’s play was quite nice, by the way. Congrats, JT.
Thanks for the shout out, Mike. I’m glad the box office could get you and Kris in (I hope you found decent seats as well).
I’m with Chris on Synecdoche. Mind you, I’ve only seen it once, but the film too infrequently turns, with surreal leaps and biting dialogue, from its own solipsistic existentialism toward something more challenging. I loved, as did Chris, everything about Tom Noonan here, especially the gray poop. I dug the tear substitutes dropped
…I’m just typing the above when Max wanders in, rubbing his eyes, upset (a dream? a leg-ache?) and I had to go rock him back to sleep. I was kicked out of my noodling, forced to grapple with his needs. He was unable to name them, and this frustrated me–I wanted him to say what was wrong, so I could quickly dispel it, put him to sleep, get back to this.
So let’s say, given the above, that I *get* Kaufman’s objective. It ain’t art I’m after, but our selfish pursuits drive us to distractions from the world in which we live. Yup. Check.
Insofar as the film enacts a surreal dislocation from such solipsism, it kept me on my toes. The tear substitutes poured in Caden’s eyes, cut immediately to him on the ground weeping, his daughter’s pink nose box gift on his lap in the strange Berlin junkyard where it was thrown. I loved the staged funeral speech, the long seemingly didactic sermon by the actor-priest, which ends its untangling of the message (see above, re kid waking up, and my own selfishness) with a concise, bitterly-funny curse on everybody else’s desires. Fuck everybody. Yes–amen.
If the movie had been more biting, and less morose… if Caden’s solipsism, the pursuit of Truth in art scornfully and corrosively dismissed… but it felt too often like we were supposed to take Caden’s drive seriously. Or his pain seriously. But I couldn’t. He had a series of bodily dysfunctions stolen from David Cronenberg’s diary, but it all felt skin-deep. Maybe we are in fact supposed to hate Caden, to excoriate his selfishness…. but it’s such a lackluster Lomanesque selfishness that it’s hard to work up much fervor, particularly over two hours.
Ambitious as all hell, and I’m very glad I saw it. But the best of Kaufman’s writing pushes right through into found contradictions and, without resolving them, finds something beautiful: at the end of Adaptation, the film enacts the commercial formula it previously lampoons and laments, and finds something beautiful there; at the end of Eternal Sunshine, the lovers run in a loop on a gray beach, and they might be reminding us of the doomed insufficiency of their romance, or they might actually be affirming some heart to that romance. Both/and. Synecdoche, on the other hand, seeks such co-incidence but tended toward the either/or. Either you felt for Caden, or you critiqued him, and the collision too rarely attained the highwire tension I’ve adored in his other films.
watched it last night. i liked it, even though i noted as it was happening that the 49 minute mark was when the film began to disappear up its own arse at a more rapid rate. wonderful performances (especially samantha morton), some great surreal bits, people examining poop up close–what’s not to like? well, some of the surreal bits felt too forced, only great style separated some from extended unfunny snl sketches, and there was too little catherine keener.
but i think i know why mauer and jeff love it so much: hoffman and kaufman clearly modelled the look of the young caden on an unholy cross of mauer and jeff.
arnab wrote: “hoffman and kaufman clearly modelled the look of the young caden on an unholy cross of mauer and jeff.”
Holy CRAP. You’re right.
this movie lost both simon and me just after caden’s wife left. actually, it lost simon a lot sooner. i did, however, like the poop examination scene.
Well, you know, I haven’t seen it on DVD yet but the cinema doesn’t give the spectator as many options/distractions as one’s living room. Actually, the first fifty minutes or so were probably more problematic for me (as mentioned above), but once the film starts to disappear up its own arse, I started to get sucked in (personally, if I’m going to get sucked into ass, I prefer it to be of the cinematic variety). I remember having a hard time identifying with and/or empathizing with Caden, but Kaufman and his character won me over during the final forty minutes or so. I do look forward to a second viewing. First, however, I have some grading to do.
when i feel better disposed towards ass-crawling i might see this again, see what it does with the play, which is, i understand, really the film’s forte.
I appreciated the movie’s wit and energy but the up-your-own-ass aspect bothered me a bit. I mean, the guy decides he wants to do major theatrical “art” because he’s tired of revivals of Our Town and Death of a Salesman but what he regards as serious art is a theatrical spectacle of his own life (huh?)I take the film as a satire of Caden’s ambitions and his over-appreciation of his own status as an “artist,” a stance which ameliorates the ass-crawling aspect, rather than an entirely sympathetic existential “portrait.”