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Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Director: Charlie Kaufman

Time Out rating

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30 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

Sadder than the saddest of sad sacks, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a director of plays in Schenectady, New York, a town as suburban as his talent. It’s the opening night of his production of ‘Death of a Salesman’, in which young actors are playing Arthur Miller’s disappointed adults, but Caden’s distracted wife Adele (Catherine Keener) is too busy working on her miniature paintings and getting stoned at home with her friend Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to come and support him. At work, Caden flirts with Hazel (Samantha Morton), the kind receptionist, but his soul is as heavy as Hazel’s is light. Caden’s life is falling apart. His body is giving way to illnesses real or imagined. The only pleasure that his marriage inspires is revealed in the maniacal grin of a sadistic therapist (Hope Davis).

And so Adele leaves him, taking their daughter Olive with her to Berlin. But things improve: Caden wins a MacArthur ‘genius’ award, meaning he can embark on the project of a lifetime. He stages an ever-expanding, never-ending, 24-hour theatre piece in a vast warehouse. It spreads through various rooms and buildings and reflects his life and mind, with actors playing him, his friends, his family.

The real world evolves – he ages; he marries and divorces an actress, Claire (Michelle Williams); he pines after Hazel, with whom he has a fling as limited as his libido; he despairs over his daughter, now a tattooed performance artist who speaks only German and believes her father left her for a man. The world of play-acting – invented by Caden but with an energy of its own – mirrors Caden’s life but also influences it, the one playing off the other to such a dizzying extent that it’s hard to distinguish between the two.

Losing grip of one’s self; the fractured, self-possessed mind of the artist; the interplay of waking lives and dreams, or waking lives and memories: they were all there in Charlie Kaufman’s scripts for ‘Being John Malkovich’, ‘Adaptation.’ and ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, and these themes also drive his first film as both writer and director. But this is more ambitious. It’s also more intangible and maybe less satisfying, in that it evades logic just at the moment that you feel you’ve got a grip on it. It’s forever slipping through your fingers. Yet also, somehow, because it resists unlocking, it feels more serious, troubling, significant. It’s as funny as it’s depressing – the burning house in which Hazel lives! Maria’s sudden German accent! The vicious therapist! The tragedy of a dying daughter refusing to forgive you for a crime you never committed!

The whole thing feels like an extended black comic note written by the most lucid but despairing of suicides. Imagine the most neurotic, inventive moments of Woody Allen’s films – the fuzzy eyesight of ‘Deconstructing Harry’, the Greek chorus of ‘Mighty Aphrodite’ – distilled and squeezed into a feature-length splurge of artistic male anxieties. It’s as brilliant as it is baffling.

Author: Dave Calhoun 2009-05-12 10:07:26

Time Out London Issue 2021 May 14-20, 2008

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User reviews of this film

UZMAN QUARTERMASS EXPERIM said...

Posted on May 26 2009 14:36 Look at me, I am so clever. Cleverer than you.

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Movie Lover said...

Posted on May 25 2009 20:11 The worst movie i have ever seen. complete waste of time and money

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usman khawaja said...

Posted on May 25 2009 15:46 SENORA TUFINIA -THANK YOU -FOR MY MONEY U WERE THE BEST OF THE SO -CALLED PAID CRITICS WHO GO TO WATCH A SCREENING AFTER FREE DRINKS AND COME OUT HAVING HAD A NAP TO PROCLAIM THAT THE ART CLASSIQUE WAS A LIFE ALTERING EXPERIENCE INDEED -JUST FORGET IT GUYS -THIS WAS A MEDIOCRE MISDIRECTED MALADY

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usman khawaja said...

Posted on May 25 2009 15:42 CARL JUNG MEETS salvador dali in a disaster-
synecdoche is a greek term referring to a parameter so charlie kaufman borrows the rather intellectual sounding word as a title of his wildly delusional and manic depiction of an indulgent playwright who typically presents the ego -inflated pseudo intellectuals of manhattan ,played by mr .hoffman as a dying duck .
the movie is a depiction of an extended mid life crisis of an inexorable male ,which here envelops the whole existence of caden corbut , the sexually promiscuous hystericaL PATHETIC and rather self absorbed miscreant who virtually exhibits every symptom of being bipolar manic depressive though he is disguised here as a pitiful and even sadder counterpart of a contemporary artist who spends more time in quest of art and ends up creating virtually nothing .
the lame script is the premise of a writer in search of a perfect play that he contrives out of his own egoistical existence and his envy of an erstwhile spouse who understandly elopes to berlin from new york with his first daughter olive .
this is a man in crisis who is obsessed with baron Munchausen syndrome from periodontitis to pseudo epilepsy but these give way to a self proclaimed genius who then becomes a bitter spoof of the Jungian psychology as to realising self and ego in the same instance by discovering your subconscious and the reality of existence .
in this instance that means promiscuity and isolation granted by anonymity as he receives a grant of billions of dollars so he can create the ultimate art house play in a huge contraption created inside ART DECO warehouses in new york .
the absurdist plot convolutes as karl jung meets salvador dali and psychology gets surreal in the midst of a vast void where one can see nothing but lofty ambition and desperate execution combined with creative bankruptcy .
the billions wasted are not as sad as the talented cast that is wasted here on a flight of surreal fantasy which is borrowed ,uninspired and misdirected and plainly pretentious as well as painfully monotonous to watch .
the idea of a play within a movie as borrowed from FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN is combined with kaufman's own BEING JOHN MALKOVICH to create a hugely dissatisfying and exasperating experience which has nothing new to offer except a novel narrative which juxtaposes various time capsules and time warps to create a rather sinister milieu but the fact it reeks of hilariously psychotic and plainly silly characters and imposes itself as a self proclaimed intellectual burden on it's viewers is unforgivable .
watch it you must to see how misguided can cinema get in it's grand allusions to self glory and egoistical worship of individuality .
the female form here is just ridiculously presented as an inferior race which is there to sexually and psychotically pleasure and alternatively torture the male psyche of CADEN CORBUT .
as for the rest just imagine the name caden corbut played with an obsessive compulsive phillip hoffman seymour and you can guess the rest .
– usman khawaja , havering,london,england

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Iain Stringer said...

Posted on May 25 2009 09:04 It seemed to me this film was more about a man looking back on/reflecting on his life. We see his anxieties/neuroses, significant events and the various people he came into contact with, but not following a linear fashion. It doesn't happen beginning-middle-end or chronologically. It looks like a snap shot, not a story. If you were at the end of your life looking back through it, it wouldn't be orderly- would it?!
I liked the seemingly many Freudian/psychoanalytical references- hysteria in some cases in terms of his anxieties. E.g.: the shaking, the teeth falling out, his daughter speaking Geman (check out Freud stuff on dreams, hysteria)
This is a man looking back on his life concerned about what he has and hasn't done. Mistakes, regrets, failings. Depressing, but interesting stuff- the inner workings of the psyche..............

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J Fitzmaurice said...

Posted on May 24 2009 17:02 Bad Teeth. Bad skin. Hair Loss. Kaufman might say he doesn't go by dream dictionary interpretations of the sub-concious. A shame he didn't look in one because he would have seen that most of the ailments he heaps on his lead are the cliches of those who are worrying about getting old and moving on. A turgid, mid-life crisis with much less wit and invention than it thinks it has. Perhaps another director could have got the script to sparkle but as it stands this is a bloated mess.

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Georgia said...

Posted on May 22 2009 11:19 The Woody Allen comparisons are spot on. That two people should be so lucky as to build their careers on clever navel-gazing is not so surprising given how inventive their minds and how quick witted they are. What I’ve never got over with Allen is that we should suspend disbelief enough to buy into one plot after another where a hapless, unattractive, self-obsessed depressive gets one beautiful girl after another and now Charlie Kaufman is on the same story arc. This wouldn’t be so ludicrous if both of them weren’t supposedly being real and squaring up to the big number: death. I thought this was very funny, laughed out loud more than I am used to, but was also deeply fatigued by the self-absorbed, self-importance of a ‘genius’ at work, however much that was meant to be a send up of himself, it is also what it was all about. Irony as a defence only goes so far. Emperor’s new clothes? I totally agree.

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Rimo said...

Posted on May 20 2009 19:37 It was the most painful 2 hours of my life!!! I was actually in pain. Wasted time and money. Utter rubbish. Don't believe pseudointelectuals trying to explain it. Too late for me but save yourselves.

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Margaret said...

Posted on May 18 2009 18:16 I went to this film with no idea what it was about. I waas fascinated and intrigued and wanted to know what it was as I was lost some of the time, puzzled and wondering whether I had failed to follow events properly or whether it really is actually difficult to follow. So I came to Google and was pleasedto find reviews which have confirmed that it is rather puzzling. I have found out that the direcdtor made 'Sunshine of the spotless mind ' which I shall look out for. I am very p[leased to have my interest in film stimulated . This is a plus.

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drawler said...

Posted on May 16 2009 16:56 4 out of 6 but think of it as 6 out of 10.
if you thought eternal sunshine was a bit overlong then you will be stupefied as to why this is as long as it is. a good film and some moments of comedy genius but ultimately it sets its ideas out early and although it builds on them they get no real development.
another director may have given it the necessary trim but as it is it fails to fully satisfy.

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ian said...

Posted on May 16 2009 00:41 Uh, this is hugely ambitious film, using all the themes Kaufmann has made familiar in his previous efforts. Chinese boxes of illusion and reality, parallel lives, fictional paradoxes, timestretches and dreamstates. A switchback ride through his head, it will infuriate you as much as impress you. If you have the patience. The Woody Allen parallel is right, except this film is not really that funny. It has sly shafts of wit, but unfortunately they are overwhelmed by the neuroses and miserabilism of Caden. There is little sympathetic about a middle class man drowning is self-pity, obsessing about every setback and slight he has endured. The laughs in BJM are gone, the romance of ES nowhere, and the constant downbeat despairing tone wore me down. Plenty of ideas (too many?), technical wizardry, and actually a genuinely moving climax, but a sprawling defeatist downer of a message. Shame..

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ARCHGATE said...

Posted on May 15 2009 19:36 A waste of time, money ... not to mention the effort you need to put in as a viewer to try and comprehend what is going on. Unfortunately, there is no reward for you when you reach the end. This is basically an essay on misery and the futility of life. He is preaching to the converted.

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Matthew McKinnon said...

Posted on May 13 2009 14:09 Oh, I don't know... I thought Eternal Sunshine was pretty good. So did the rest of the world, if I remember right.
I bought this on BluRay from the US afew months ago, despairing of it ever getting a release here. It's excellent, but it does flag towards the end [though I think it will feel less so with a second viewing. I hope Kaufman directs many more films if they're as good as this one.
What an amazing cast, as well. If Julianne Moore were in there somewhere it'd be a full house.

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Steve Millar said...

Posted on May 12 2009 12:45 Well if one of the above posters top ten fave films is Eternal Sunshine then we can safely take her opinion as utterly meaningless.

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Senora Tufinia said...

Posted on May 12 2009 01:07 The Emperor's new clothes. I really wanted to like this film, as Eternal Sunshine is in my top10ever, but no, no, no and again, no. Someone should tell Charlie, that 'truth" doesnt only mean writing about one's own writer's block or self-doubt. that is an ok starting point, but what did he do with it? we watch the characters age, the production grow (very expansive first feature!) and we get nothing out of it, that we didn't learn from the first 15mins of the film already. This is supposed to be ultra witty intellectual piece of cinema, and instead, its just the superlong story of a looser. Naked. Charlie, please dont direct again, but go back and try to come up with a script as good and original as JohnMalkovich was. Please.

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