I’ve just finished watching Synecdoche, New York. Words temporarily fail me, so first some review quotes that I highly agree with.
Manohla Dargis in the New York Times:
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. That at least would be an appropriate response to a film about failure, about the struggle to make your mark in a world filled with people who are more gifted, beautiful, glamorous and desirable than the rest of us — we who are crippled by narcissistic inadequacy, yes, of course, but also by real horror, by zits, flab and the cancer that we know (we know!) is eating away at us and leaving us no choice but to lie down and die.
Despite its slippery way with time and space and narrative and Mr. Kaufman’s controlled grasp of the medium, “Synecdoche, New York” is as much a cry from the heart as it is an assertion of creative consciousness. It’s extravagantly conceptual but also tethered to the here and now, which is why, for all its flights of fancy, worlds within worlds and agonies upon agonies, it comes down hard for living in the world with real, breathing, embracing bodies pressed against other bodies. To be here now, alive in the world as it is rather than as we imagine it to be, seems a terribly simple idea, yet it’s also the only idea worth the fuss, the anxiety of influence and all the messy rest, a lesson hard won for Caden. Life is a dream, but only for sleepers.
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. A lot of people these days don’t even go to a movie once. There are alternatives. It doesn’t have to be the movies, but we must somehow dream. If we don’t “go to the movies” in any form, our minds wither and sicken. This is a film with the richness of great fiction. Like Suttree, the Cormac McCarthy novel I’m always mentioning, it’s not that you have to return to understand it. It’s that you have to return to realize how fine it really is. The surface may daunt you. The depths enfold you. The whole reveals itself, and then you may return to it like a talisman.
So I’m immediately at a disadvantage. I’ve only seen it once. I think I could watch this every day and get something different from it, something more. But that’s me. I think that most people who watch this film are going to be confused, bored or even hate it.
I don’t even know how to describe the movie. Attempting to sum up its plot in a few sentences seems pointless because, well, it’s not just that the plot is almost secondary. Yes, it’s a film about a theatrical director who wants to leave something great behind, gets a warehouse and starts putting together a play about the lives of everyone in the world, everyone a leading actor in their own tale, all the tales taking place simultaneously, about rehearsing and refining for 40 years and never opening. But is that what it’s about? It’s wildly ambitious. It’s a very funny film in spots. And it’s overwhelmingly sad too. It’s about failure and blown opportunities and misunderstandings and lies. And it’s also probably the best movie about the creative process since Barton Fink.
I haven’t seen this mentioned in any review that I’ve read but it strikes me that Charlie Kaufman has turned into the great surrealist director Luis Bunuel. It’s not just little touches, like Hazel buying and living in a house that’s on fire. It’s the way the line is blurred between the film’s reality and the reality of the play being seen within the film. What are we watching? When these people talk, who are they talking as? At one point we have the director and his assistant watching actors playing the director and his assistant directing a director and assistant.
And he pulls something towards the end of this movie that only Bunuel (as far as I know) ever attempted. How to even describe it? Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has been secretly cleaning his ex-wife’s apartment, replacing maid Ellen who never shows up. Millicent (Dianne Wiest) portrays Ellen in the play, or she portrays Caden masquerading as Ellen. And as Caden gets older and ill, Millicent takes over for Caden as director, and all of a sudden, the movie is about Millicent and about Ellen and Caden becomes just another character, someone reduced to taking direction via a wireless earpiece. We get Ellen’s life and Ellen’s dreams and Caden is speaking Ellen’s lines, prompted by Millicent.
Anyway, this is the first film directed by Charlie Kaufman, who as a writer gave us Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich and others. It stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Tom Noonan, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest.
====================================
If Synecdoche is the cinematic equivalent of a literary novel, the other film I watched this weekend barely even qualifies as pulp fiction. I watched In The Electric Mist, being released straight to video in the US, because I’m a fan of author James Lee Burke and his series of crime novels featuring bayou detective Dave Robicheaux.
Burke is by no means a great writer, but he is a very good one, one who sometimes manages to transcend his genre. And if anyone is right for Robicheaux, that’s Tommy Lee Jones. He’s comfortable enough in the role but as portrayed in the film, the character is far less complex than the one in the novels. And this film, which also stars Mary Steenburgen (wasted!), John Goodman (wasted!), Peter Saarsgard, Ned Beatty, Levon Helm and Buddy Guy has no magic, no pacing and very little narrative drive.
Director Bertrand Tavernier (Coup de Torchon, ‘Round Midnight) just doesn’t bring it. One of many mistakes is that he has decided to change the setting so that it takes place post-Katrina (something that Burke dealt with in a far richer manner in a different Robicheaux book) and then he does nothing but use that for background. It’s almost exploitation.
The only reason I’m mentioning this is that I’ve heard that the European cut is said to be very different from the American version. But honestly, if you come across this in a video shop and you like the cast and think maybe you ought to give it a try? Don’t bother.
