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Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Director: Charlie Kaufman

Time Out rating

Average user rating

25 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

Dan Roberts said...

Posted on Jul 03 2009 11:26 This film works for me and doesn’t slip into being pretentious because of it’s throwaway filming style – everything is underplayed. A huge amount of detail is present but nothing is rammed down our throats, and so it never tilts over into hyperbole.
Several contributors here seem upset because the film has lofty ambitions or they feel Mr Kaufman is attempting to present himself as being clever. What would you have him do? Dumb it down? Artificially place some restraint on his invention?
I identified, in my own small way, with Caden Cotard. The self-centred need to fulfil one’s true potential at the expense of all else – Caden comes to realise that he has his priorities wrong much too late. It actually resonated with the chunk of the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ used in the BBC’s recent ‘Occupation’, which goes:
‘Gilgamesh, what you seek you will never find. For when the Gods created Man they let death be his lot, eternal life they withheld. Let your every day be full of joy, love the child that holds your hand, let your wife delight in your embrace, for these alone are the concerns of humanity’.

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Milli Schmidt said...

Posted on Jun 22 2009 16:22 Thank you Usman Khawaja for your below, excellent review of this film - not only was TO's five star assessment off, most importantly the review itself was utterly superficial and failed to mention the main themes and failures of the film. I normally agree with TO's assessments overall so am very curious who did this one. SYnecdoche is kinda interesting - very difficult/boring to watch but throws some ideas at you - but the ultimate failure to provide ironic relief AND judgement of the 'inexorant male' character and his selfishness, anger and destructions of himself and others sticks out as its greatest failure. Caden is an a**hole and I pity anyone who is unlucky enough to have to deal with anyone like this in their lives (for people like him do exist!).

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Asish said...

Posted on Jun 22 2009 13:33 Dull, pretentious and utterly miserable. I couldnt wait for it to end and almost walked out, the only thing that stopped me was the faint hope that it might somehow suddenly take a turn for the better (but it never did). I thought it was a self-indugent piece of cinema and I am annoyed at having wasted 2 hours and 10bucks on it.

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nina said...

Posted on Jun 19 2009 10:57 the most sad, beautiful and profound film ever - difficult does not mean pretentious!!

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Bara Evans said...

Posted on Jun 13 2009 07:25 Dire. Not as bad as the previous Time Out five starrer in that I didn't actually walk out this time. But, guys, just becuase a film uses a big word in the title and is dull, dull, dull it doesn't mean it has artistic merit.
And why aren't no stars counted in the punters' assessment. A few films slip through because we only put a comment.

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Roz said...

Posted on Jun 12 2009 09:54 Charlie Kaufman is a genuis. Loved it with only minor squibbles. Most of the above comments say SO much about the people making comments. Did anyone spot the homage to Paris, Texas moment? Given how crap and original most films are out there, this was an amazing injection of originality, whatever will he come up with next? 9/10

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Jane said...

Posted on Jun 05 2009 21:56 Despite its refusal to provide any comfort or give any answers, Kaufman's swan-song to the difficulty of life, creativity and love has its own kind of fully formed weightiness and completion. It might feel flippant and cynical at moments, but this heavily satrical and wry piece has some serous bite. Ripping the skin of intellectuality, irony and artistic vocation, it exposes the sentimentality and homliness underneath the most complex and lofty ideas about being alive. Kaufman's sense of the ridiculous pervades both verbally and visually, tinting the whole experience with a rare kind good humor, achieved against pressure of occasionally rather uncomfortable awarenesses.

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Senora Tufinia said...

Posted on Jun 04 2009 17:17 i think it is pretty misleading, that timeout doesnt count the zero stars into the user rating. if you read the user's reviews here, most of them dislike the film, and dont give any stars. still, the average is 4 stars, which is not at all reflecting the opinion of the users. Here, timeout gave 5 stars (why???) and the users gave, on average around 1,5stars. Timeout ppl should do something about this. thanks

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Tony Kaye said...

Posted on Jun 04 2009 17:01 This was a morbid, turgid, utterly boring total piece of rubbish. It's the last time I shall take any note of a five star rating from any of your critics. Folks don't waste your money or your time, the film is pure crap.

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Marek said...

Posted on May 30 2009 15:28 This was a fine film. Have seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and found it fascinating. Some of the same themes - the fragility of mortality, love etc - are tackled in this film. The first hour of the film is a treat. Do go and see it, since you will not forgive yourself if you do not. However, in contrast to Charlie Faufmann's earlier effort, the film thinks that it is more significant than it truly is. In contrast to the first hour, the second drags horribly.

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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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