By Linda Winsh-Bolard
Synecdoche (rhetorical noun) is a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part, the special for the general or the general for the special, as in ten sail for ten ships or a Croesus for a rich man(as the dictionary advises).
The name of the film describes what the film attempts to portray. This is a film critics and intellectuals love (or think they are supposed to and hence play up to it). It’s long, complicated, murky, and at the end you feel that you must have missed something very important because it is simply not possible that all it had to say, was what you think it did.
Canden (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a theater director in Synecdoche, New York. A successful theater director in provincial town, who gets bumped on the head and discovers fear of death, dying and oblivion. Suddenly he wishes to leave something important behind. And while his painter wife Adele(Catherine Keener) takes their daughter and leaves for Germany where she starts her new life minus Canden, Canden receives a huge, prestigious grant to do with as he pleases.
He moves to New York to recreate life on stages build in warehouses and captured on videotape.
The more Canden re-creates, the more he wants to get closer life' core. His creation is never ready for an audience. Canden casts everybody involved in his life, veritably recreating himself, his lovers, children and friends.
For most of the film, Canden clearly distinguishes between the play and reality, even as the audience is lost in time and location jumps. At the very end, the play and Canden’s reality mesh together.
There is plenty of quirkiness in the film, plenty of good acting, Diane Wiest (Ellen/Milicent) is at her best, and she is excellent, but there is actually very little in a form of message, and that which is there, is old and unhelpful. As for Canden’s character, it is hard to feel sorry for hypochondriac, psychotic, cavorting man, whose only real obsession is himself, and who got lucky with money (one of the successful and undoubtedly true quirks is the grant. It reminded me of a man I once asked at an Embassy party what was he doing there. Oh, I just wanted to visit the ambassador’s family, but I got a grant to do it, he said seriously).
It’s obvious that Charlie Kaufman, as always, tries to encompass the unpredictability, dreams, disappointments and fears of life as whole. His messenger is the self obsessed Canden Cotard. Kaufman made a truly experimental film with no time, place or continuity boundaries. Through that experiment Kaufman takes aims at our expectations, stereotypes and weakness, but he fails to see the heroism of the ordinary.
Not because he does not want to, after all, he presents life as a story where everybody plays the lead, but because he fails to see that people’s abilities, intelligence, courage and determination might not bring them anything at all, should their circumstances be adversary. The prevalent belief of the 60’, that everyone has a choice, sounds hollow in 2008. We were forced to admit that accidents of birth and connections are far more important than talent and hard work. We no longer condemn people based on their lack of “success” having admitted that many very successful people did not achieve their success honestly.
Kaufman also fails on the entertainment. This film is not easy to watch or even sit through. Even if this is deliberate, it remains a fault.
If, however, you are into untangling the various clues and threats of the world tapestry of the mundane, then you will love Synecdoche, New York. There is plenty of the obscure to discover and ponder(name of the film and character included). If you feel that the philosophy of “we all make choices and at the end we are all in the same boat” is irritating; than this is not a film you’d want to see.
Caden Philip Seymour Hoffman
Hazel Samantha Morton
Claire Michelle Williams
Adele Catherine Keener
Tammy Emily Watson
Ellen /Millicent Dianne Wiest
Maria Jennifer Jason Leigh
Madeleine Hope Davis
Directed by Charlie Kaufman
