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Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Director: Charlie Kaufman

Time Out rating

Average user rating

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

MIKE said...

Posted on Oct 10 2009 00:12 greatest film of it's type ever. the most Truth, with the least amount of pretention.
Whah, it didn't have enough action
Whah, it didn't have enough romance
Whah, it got too many stars and tries to be too smart
it's not for everyone, and yet is a gift for anyone who is willing and able to get it...

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Henry Thorpe said...

Posted on Oct 05 2009 18:13 It felt like Kaufman was just making it up as he went along. A very tedious film.

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Jane said...

Posted on Aug 11 2009 09:48 I agree - but you miss two important things in saying it is unbearably depressing . It is about difficultly and it does ruthlessly attack some of the ways we force meaning into the chaotic material of life. There is , however, a heavy vien of self-satire which lightens the desperation, extreme desperation is shown in the film as the product of the over investment in the illusion of individual importance.
I also think that the film strongly believes in its communication. shows some incredible imaginative intimacy with some apparently unlikeable charaters. Most importantly, the ending aches with hope as it renders a tenderness and compassion in the audience. This really is an incredible achievement against the almost overwhelming sense of the ridicoulous that has been building since the opening sequence.

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Tim R said...

Posted on Aug 11 2009 01:25 Wow, everyone here completely missed the point of this movie. You are all taking it far too literally. I just saw this movie on DVD last weekend and thought it was unbearably depressing, brutally sad and one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. The movie isn’t about a theater director named Caden. The movie is about the utter futility and pointlessness of the human condition. The huge replica he builds of New York city on his sound stage is a metaphor for the artifice that is all of our lives and the desperate way in which we try to fill them with meaningful content. The fact that he dies without finishing his masterpiece is the heartbreaking, soul crushing truth of all of our existences. We will finish nothing and in the end some self-constructed version of our self whispers in our ear, telling us what to, how to react and eventually when to die.

Brilliant movie.

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Miss Lemon said...

Posted on Jul 27 2009 20:16 I wish I could go to the Spotless Mind Clinic and have Synecdoche erased from my memory. It was the worst movie I have ever seen. Kaufman should never direct again. Maybe this green tird of a script would have been better realized by a great director. Yes, I have been a great fan of his in the past.

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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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