Synedoche, New York is the first directorial outing by Charlie Kaufman, who has previously written a string of brilliant movies that includes Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – each, in their own way, thoughtful, intelligent and complex fantasies.
If you enjoyed those films then you are undoubtedly going to get something out of Synedoche, New York but whether it is pleasure or pain may depend on your state of mind. There will be plenty of people who dismiss the film as relentlessly self-indulgent and plenty of others who, noting the absence of car-chases and explosions, will be bored out of their mind. It’s hard to imagine anyone embracing it as a film experience they “love” – it’s an emotionally harsh and somewhat cold film – but it is a film that makes you think. This is a film that is striving to be “art” – in the same sense as great plays or great novels and of all those working in the modern American film industry Charlie Kaufman is one of only a handful of filmmakers who is capable of working at this level.
Synedoche, New York is not an easy film to love, but it is an intellectually impressive construct that demands that the viewer works hard. It will also make those who stick with it think hard about their own lives.
Not that this is, necessarily, a good thing. There are occasions when watching this film might be a mistake.
Say, like this reviewer, you were on the very eve of a significant birthday, a birthday that ends in a zero and that might mark the very end of your relative youth and the passing into what can only be described as middle-age – say, hypothetically, your fortieth birthday. And say that the approach of this marker had caused in you some mild flickers of concern – not a full blown “mid-life crisis” or anything so dramatic – but merely, by prompting you to look back over what you’ve achieved so far, a slight sense of disappointment at the knowledge that some missed opportunities may never open again and some paths taken were not the most fruitful. Not depression, then, but say you felt a little fragile.
If you are in such a condition then please take the advice of someone who has trodden the path before you. Do not choose this moment to watch Synedoche, New York. Put it off for a while. Watch a rom com or a bromance. Save this for later – you might save a fortune on psychiatric bills.
Synedoche, New York is a spectacular achievement that can be admired for the breadth of imagination, the wonderfully clever dialogue, brilliant acting, the fantastic production and the sheer amazement that a film of such complexity, depth and intelligence can be produced by Sony, the same studio who brought the world Paul Blart: Mall Cop. But Kaufman has harnessed his considerable abilities to bring us a story that is fiercely bleak. He weighs our human frailties and the nature of the human condition, stares us straight in the eye and tells us that the wonders we build, the art we create, the loves we hold dear and lives we live are all fragmentary and fleeting and that they are all consumed by decay and death.
Caden Cotard (the frequently astonishing Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a theatre director. He’s an ordinary, moderately successful guy who is not particularly good at relationships and his life is literally slipping away from him – in the opening scene he wakes in October and doesn’t make it to breakfast until November. His family life falls apart but he wins a prize, a genius grant, and the money to create his dream work of art. He sets out to create a recreation of his own life, with actors playing him and his loves, friends and acquaintances (and ultimately actors playing the actors who play his loves, friends and acquaintances) in a perfect copy of New York, inside which there is perfect copy of New York, inside which there is a perfect copy of New York... on and on like infinitely stacked Russian dolls.
Like Kaufman’s other works, Synedoche, New York’s prime concern is the way that we create the world in our mind and the way in which our understanding of everything that happens outside our own skulls is mediated by various “fantasies” that we construct for ourselves. Caden attempts to understand his world by reconstructing the city, to control his relationships with those he loves by directing their lives in his internal play. But the more obsessed he becomes with this internal construction, even as it becomes apparently more complete and convincing, the less grip he has on the real world and the things that should matter – the more distant he become from those he could love.
And, of course, in the end it all turns to dust because we cannot control the world, even the copies of it we construct ourselves.
Synedoche, New York is not for everyone. Most will not watch it because it is long and slow and meditative and does not contain pyrotechnics. Of those that remain, plenty of others will find it maudlin, self-indulgent and pretentious. For those that get it, however, there will be something bracingly astringent about the way Kaufman looks square in the face of our one certain, collective fate. There’s no consolation here, there is, however, a brave and ambitious but difficult film.