Synecdoche, New York by long-time writer and Oscar winner, and now, first-time director, Charlie Kaufman, is the kind of movie that only…oh, I’ll be generous here…1 in 15 will enjoy. Those who know me well know that I have a love of film that represents a major annoyance. For example, Doug Lahman loves to try to push my buttons by saying things like “Taxi Driver was probably the worst movie I’ve ever seen. What a waste of time.” and the like. One time, as part of a radio promotion, he won two tickets for a surprise screening. The movie? Punch-Drunk Love. He hated it, of course. Me? I think Punch-Drunk Love is one of Paul Thomas Anderson’s very best work.
The point here is that I have an appreciation for a good art film. Not everyone does. That’s my point. So I saw Synecdoche, New York about a year ago but it was one of those half-watching, half-asleep kind of deals, you know? I watched it again last week and I find myself unable to get this New Style Horror film (could it even be science-fiction horror?) out of my mind.
First, let’s talk about that title. Synecdoche (si-NEK-doh-kee) is a literary device. Other literary devices are easy to explain on their own like irony or metaphor but synecdoche is merely a single side of a coin, the other side belonging to metonymy (meh-TAW-nuh-mee). I’m going to outright steal from wikipedia because coming up with an original explanation for these two terms is just one of a great many things my walnut-sized brain cannot do.
From the Greek synekdoche, meaning “simultaneous understanding”), it is a figure of speech in which something is used to refer to the whole thing, a thing (a “whole”) is used to refer to part of it, or a specific class of thing is used to refer to a larger, more general class. Metonymy is easier because it’s related to metaphor. Where metaphor relies on similarity to get it’s point across, metonymy relies on congruity. More rigorously, metonymy and synecdoche may be considered as sub-species of metaphor, intending metaphor as a type of conceptual substitution.
OK, enough of that shit. This is a movie review after all. The film is set in Schenectady, New York and the title allows for a big-time play on words. Hooray for the English language! A nebbish theater director named Caden Cotard, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is busy producing Death of a Salesman when his wife Adele, played by Catherine Keener, and their child, Olive, depart for Berlin so Adele can pursue her art career.
At this point, Caden unexpectedly receives a MacArthur Fellowship, giving him the money 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 each 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 Adele becomes a celebrated painter in Berlin and Olive grows up under the questionable guidance of Adele’s friend Maria. He marries Claire, an actress in his cast. Their relationship fails and he continues his awkward relationship with Hazel. Meanwhile, a mysterious 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 the world of the play and that of reality 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 twenty years, while Sammy’s lookalike is cast for his part. Sammy’s own interest in Hazel sparks a revival of Caden’s relationship with her.
As he pushes the limits of his relationships, both personally and professionally, Caden lets an actress take over his role as director and takes her previous job as Adele’s cleaning lady. He lives out his days under the replacement director’s instruction, finally preparing for death as he rests his head on the shoulder of an actress in the play, seemingly the only person left alive in the warehouse. As the scene fades to grey, Caden says that he has an idea for how to do the play when the director’s voice in his ear gives him his final cue: “Die.”
That paltry plot description belies the humor, the wit, and the recursive wonder of this story. If there’s a better way to get people to think about their own mortality in two hours, I’d rather not know about it. The great thing about the film is that you don’t have to spend time thinking about what this action represents or why that character’s said what he just said…if you just watch it, it kind of finds it’s own purchase into your mind. Repeated viewings also allow you access to things overlooked, of which there are many. Some motifs to watch for: the psychology of Carl Jung, the burning house, artistic scale as part of the medium, and also references to clocks, delusion, and recursion.
I loved it, loved it, loved it! And while I’m not alone, the film has been criticized for being ponderous, self-indulgent, and incomprehensible. I wonder if there will be a sequel? Metonymy, Florida?