A folly

In this behemoth, this collection of characters in search of a story, hip screenwriter Charlie Kaufman delivers a directorial debut of enormous ambition. Earlier writing-only Kaufman efforts like Being John Malkovich, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are brilliant provocations. But this time, his screenplay is not subject to the dispassionate control of the director--because he's the director. The wearying result stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as a depressed schlub called Caden Cotard. He too is a director, of the theatrical kind--and also out of control once he's allowed to stage his own work. Caden has had a modicum of recognition, but it doesn't save him from a whole host of problems--psychological, physical, and marital, which convince him that his death is near--a thought harped on incessantly that signals the film's other chief weaknesses besides its self-indulgence: its portentousness and its sentimentality.

Given a Macarthur "genius" award just after his painter wife has taken their little daughter and left him to live in Berlin, protagonist Cotard plunges into a giant, quixotic project that goes on for decades and is never finished. He fashions an outsize stage that's a microcosm of the world--or his world anyway. Perhaps this is the point of using "synecdoche" (the rhetorical term for using a part to stand for the whole) in the title. But more likely this is just a rather childish play on words, since the film's set in Schenectady, and Caden's boxes-within-boxes excess is far from rhetorical elegance: it's not synecdoche, it's a clumsy life-size replica. Kaufman's recreating of Caden Cotard's neurotic, dazed life and his overblown stagecraft gradually emerges as not so much a revelation about the artistic struggle as a compendium of what could be outtakes from every depressed schlub role Hoffman has ever played--all jumbled together without anything to connect them but throwaway displays of cleverness and bizarre, unfunny humor. Despite its ponderousness and ambition, the film never finds a consistent tone.

In the first section, which one may long to return to when the tedious repetitions of the theatrical production set in, Caden is suffering a series of Jobian torments and lives in what appears to be a state of justifiable hypochondria. He gets boils, jitters, has a seizure, his pupils don't dilate properly, he's prematurely arthritic, or thinks he is. Worst of all, he's miserably unhappy and afraid of dying. Meanwhile his blithe indifferent wife Adele Lack (Catherine Keener) goes off to Berlin with little Olive (Sadie Goldstein), a child who suffers from green stools, fitting with her name. Caden sees a series of puzzling or bizarre physicians, but just gets more ailments--some of which may be purely psychosomatic. The focus on odious bodily fluids and other disgusting aspects of human decline here is almost (but not quite) worthy of Hieronymous Bosch.

After he's abandoned by his wife, who ominously exclaims on the phone from Berlin "I'm famous!," and gets the Macarthur grant, Caden tells his therapist, the archly named Madeleine Gravis (Hope Davis), that he thinks he's dying and he wants to accomplish something before he dies. "Yes, that would be the time to do it," she dryly comments. So he takes on a vast aerodrome of a building on a city street and fills it with unemployed actors. Earlier, he has had a critical success with a production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in which the principals are played by young actors--in a self-conscious effort at the Alienation Effect, or to make the audience think about aging. But Adele chides him for not doing something completely his own--thus maliciously opening a Pandora's box of overblown ambition and fanatical verisimilitude, for Caden's effort is to copy everyone he knows. And like computer files, they clone themselves every time they seem to have been canceled out.

There are a number of women, all of whom resemble the eager, sweet Hazel (Samantha Morton), a would-be thespian who buys a house that's perpetually on fire. One of these is Claire Keen (Michelle Williams). Time goes by without Caden being aware of it, though the makeup man shows us he's getting older by decades. Olive grows up in Berlin as a figure of the local decadent hip culture, covered in tattoos by her best friend, Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who becomes her lesbian lover. Caden's effort to get through to Olive is frustrating and dreamlike. He winds up scrubbing his ex-wife's toilet and kitchen when she's not there. Adele's celebrated paintings, which are said to be marvels of truth and reality, are tiny, and viewers in galleries must wear jeweler's magnifying glasses headsets to walk around and view them. This curious detail is one of many examples of how Kaufman's writing blends the surreal and the comic, and defies the viewer to distinguish between the actual and the dreamed or imagined. Emily Watson and Dianne Wiest round out the interesting female leads, who seem as coldly manipulated as any of Lars von Trier's.

Caden's life is marked by a cruel absurdity worthy of the early novels of Nabokov. Like the Russian master, Kaufman supplies his sad sack hero with a smiling doppelgänger, Sammy Barnathan (Tom Noonan)--who doesn't resemble Caden at all (he's tall and thin), but qualifies to play him because he has followed him around for 20 years. But Nabokov would have rounded things out elegantly with a mock-detective story finish, like the duel between Humbert Humbert and Claire Quilty toward the end of Lolita. Instead, alas, Synecdoche becomes more and more repetitious and maudlin, the theatrical event Caden is staging becomes increasingly conceptual and uninvolving, and the movie clunks to a mechanical finish, weighed down by its own ambition, not to mention its tendentiousness and free-floating gloom.

This is material that Pirandello explored--thus making it more early modern than post-modern, in fact, though Kaufman often gets the latter label. It also touches on themes that occur in the films of Jacques Rivette. Above all one thinks this whole fantasmagoric production might best have been handled by Fellini. But he already did it, and the result was 8½. Kaufman hasn't Fellini's visual sense or virtuosity in staging complicated crowd sequences. His actors just pop up awkwardly here and there in clumps.

Kaufman and Michel Gondry are two talented cinema artists whose invention needs to be held in check or given a structure, and (surprisingly, perhaps) they collaborated brilliantly in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Working on his own as both writer and director in The Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind, Gondry grows too whimsical. Here, Kaufman simply has become too self-indulgent, and lacks the passion and empathy of a Werner Herzog in pursuing his quixotic striver.

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Review reprint with some discussion on Filmleaf here.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.