Synecdoche, New York (2008)
Directed by Charlie Kaufman
A theater director struggles with his work, and the women in his life, as he attempts to create a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse as part of his new play.
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36 films that influenced Synecdoche, New York
What critics say influenced Synecdoche, New York
Yet the most surreal segment of the production is the incredibly massive city-size theatrical extravaganza Caden undertakes after obtaining a MacArthur grant for his enormous success with a rejuvenated reworking of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman cast entirely with young people.
The title is both a term meaning a part that is used to refer to the whole, or vice versa, as well as a wordplay on the upstate city of Schenectady, where Caden Cotard (Hoffman) is staging an avant-garde production of "Death of a Salesman."
Caden is currently putting on a revisionist play of "Death of a Salesman," casting young twenty-somethings in much older roles as a way of telling the audience that these actors, too, will end up alone and gasping their last breath like the characters they are portraying.
In any event: I don't know where or whether it's appropriate to say yes, it's tempting to wish that Synecdoche, lensed by Blue Velvet's Frederick Elmes, looked a bit more polished or had a visual imagination to match its verbal and structural and philosophical aspirations.
He’s like David Lynch if Mr. Blue Velvet dropped the dream logic and applied a more analytical angst to his projects.
I do wonder in a rhetorical way whether the film would be received differently were it a lost Kieslowski or a Godard at the peak of his narrative aggression, though it reminds more as a whole of David Lynch's "Hitchcock" pictures ( Blue Velvet , Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive ), which found in their rhythmic Americana banality the dull thrum of existential horror.
Synecdoche stands in relation to Kaufman's best previous screenplays (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ) in the same way that David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE stood in relation to Mulholland Drive, which means that Synecdoche is, on the surface, a less seductive work with less lubricated points of audience entry, and yet it has the chops and the conviction to amplify while also deconstructing the earlier films.
Like David Lynch's Inland Empire, there will be people who tell you they understand every twist and turn and what it all means in the grand narrative.
There's another film I thought of a few times while watching this one: David Lynch's Inland Empire , in which an artist even more trapped in his head than Kaufman got to make a movie almost completely without outside interference.
It happened in 1961, with that high-society puzzle obscura Last Year at Marienbad, and in 2006, with David Lynch's through-the-looking-glass bore Inland Empire.
In the beginning of the film we see Cotard staging Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" using actors deliberately chosen to be too young for their roles.
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It happened in 1961, with that high-society puzzle obscura Last Year at Marienbad, and in 2006, with David Lynch's through-the-looking-glass bore Inland Empire.
The extent to which he pushes the warehouse scenario goes beyond the work of legendary directors like Jacques Rivette on the ‘film within a film’ (CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING) and takes the audience on a journey that is more than a formalist foray into the meaning of film (or indeed theatre) production for its paricipants.
Compare Dennis Potter’s great mini-series of the nineteen-eighties, “The Singing Detective,” and you will see much the same setup—a wry leading man with a skin disease, inspired by a furious creative itch—rendered with unstinting vigor.
Kaufman seems to draw from Pirandello's play Six Characters in Search of an Author, Ingmar Bergman's Persona and Federico Fellini's 8 1/2.
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It's the first movie this year that demands at least two viewings to absorb its densely textured humor, which makes earlier Kaufman works such as "Adaptation" and "Being John Malkovich" look positively straightforward.
For all the unprecedented daring and invention in "Being John Malkovich," "Human Nature," "Adaptation" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," they have struck me as academic and cool, alluding to emotions rather than truly mining them.
One of the most insightful and philosophically observant writers in any medium, Kaufman won an Oscar for his "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and was nominated for "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation."
Re-reading what I wrote about other films written by Charlie Kaufman ( Being John Malkovich , Adaptation , and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ) I see that I've compared his work to origami pieces, and I still think that's apt.
With Charlie Kaufman, the writer of such movies as Being John Malkovich , Adaptation , and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , one expects something weird and wonderful.
Synecdoche, New York was originally supposed to be shot by Spike Jonze, who gave Kaufman his break from working on sitcoms and The Dana Carvey Show by directing Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, and much of what’s good in this film could well be attributed to Jonze’s absence.
Later, Caden will fly to Berlin to track down his daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein), who's fallen into the clutches of his wife's scary best friend, Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh, hilariously riffing on the scary-best-friend role she's specialized in ever since Single White Female).