I have a new favorite film of all time, but it has sadly split my household right down the middle. I can certainly appreciate that such a profoundly figurative work as Synecdoche, New York is in some sense unwatchable. What plot there is exists only to support the central conceit of the film. Philip Seymour Hoffman is Caden Cotard, a lovelorn theater director who hopes to find meaning in his life and to secure his professional legacy by staging an ambitious play. But the story, how Caden loses one wife and daughter and runs out on another, how he navigates the pitfalls of intellectual snobbery in the art world, is less important as plot than it is as vehicle for writer/director Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) to interrogate the nature of tropes themselves. It is, then, a movie about not literally meaning what we say and about thus saying more by so doing.
I would never presume to offer an interpretation of the film. Instead, here is a list of some of the things that most interest me about it.
1. Comparing Caden with Adele, his estranged wife. The scale of Caden's ambition is huge. He seeks, through his play, to direct, to manipulate everyone in the stage version of his life that he starts to develop. Adele, on the other hand, paints miniatures, paintings so small that they can be seen only by magnification. She is the one who, for all we can see, achieves something approaching fame, and she develops a show based on her impressions of the women who have been important to her. Both Caden and Adele are forty years old at the start of the film. On the verge of middle age -- like me, that is why I like this so! -- she takes a risk and makes her name while he wallows in his narcissism.
2. Death of a Salesman. For some people, Arthur Miller's tragedy is the most important play of the twentieth century. Caden stages it with young actors, to demonstrate, he claims, the inevitability of aging and death. Adele rejects the work as pandering to the suburban dinner theater crowd, but she also suggests that there is something profoundly fraudulent about performing the works of others. This reveals all kinds of implications for...
3. Caden as writer and director. He is unfulfilled when working on Arthur Miller, and his response is to seek truth by using his surroundings as his inspiration. Miller is author of Salesman, but Caden collaborates by directing. Writing and directing his own life, Caden assumes both roles, but he finds that he is less of an author than perhaps he imagines. The characters persist in behaving as they will, and the different layers of the story overlap: the "real" characters interact with the "actors" and another layer must be introduced. Is God thus frustrated by our free will?
4. Olive. She is the child of Caden and Adele's marriage. She is, in a real sense, the artifact of their union. She is a work of art, as even her "leavings" are found to be olive green, a manifestation of her metaphor. She grows up to become a kind of performance artist, embracing tattoo art and exotic dancing. Her diary, left with her father, is always a reflection of what she is doing, seemingly writing itself.
5. Caden's hypochondria. Mr. Kaufman engages the middle-aged stereotype of hypochondria. Caden seems to have problems with his teeth and gums; he endures a nasty bump to the head that gets him referred to an opthamologist and a neurologist. He suffers unexplained pustules and seizures. But as he embraces his "play" and, eventually, ages fifty years, all this disappears. Why does his health improve in old age?
6. Hazel and her house. Played by Samantha Morton (Minority Report, In America), box office clerk Hazel is, to me, the most interesting character in the film. She is the one who shows the qualities we covet -- playfulness, ambition, loyalty, and the ability to learn -- but she may be most distinguished by her house: 2200 square feet and perpetually on fire. It is the most surreal element in Synecdoche, New York, but it is also the literal manifestation of an expression meaning "frenzied." It is also a reminder of how she is running out of time, of how we all endure menace daily.
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