Yesterday's Views

Rating: * * * * * (drive out and rent it)
Audience: not for kids
Genre: bizarro drama

Ten words or less: Troubled man delves into immense creative project that consumes him

Synecdoche –noun 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. (www.dictionary.com)

If writer/director Charlie Kaufman had lived in post-war France, he would have had his place among Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, the greats in the Theatre of the Absurd. But as Kaufman lives among us here in the twenty-first century, his strange art finds its voice in the cinema. Kaufman, writer for such movies as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Adaptation, makes his directorial debut in Synecdoche, New York.

This movie is humorous, but in a way that is as dark and bitter as unsweetened cocoa. The story is obsessed with death, and begins with playwright/director Caden Cotard (artfully played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) reading the obituary page to his wife while he eats breakfast. It is evident that Cotard's body is, quite literally, falling apart. Pustules appear on his legs and face, his poo is strange, his pupils don't react in a normal fashion. He's a mess.

The playwright's body isn't the only thing falling apart. His marriage is as well. Cotard's artistic wife Adele (Catherine Keener) at first refuses to attend the opening of his play and then whisks his young daughter off to Germany, leaving Cotard alone.

Cotard is despondent over the loss of his family, yet when he receives a miraculous windfall in the form of a MacArthur grant, he is inspired to put on a play about life. The scale of this play is so massive that the set, built in an impossibly large warehouse, is an exact replica of Manhattan. The play is rehearsed and re-rehearsed for over seventeen years, and in the end, not a single person ever comes to see it.

Part of what makes Synecdoche so fascinting is its themes of repetition and mirror images (hence, the name). The set for Cotard's play is so faithful a replica of Manhattan that it also includes a smaller version of the warehouse in which the play is being held. And in that warehouse is another replica of Manhattan which includes yet another warehouse, and in that warehouse is another Manhattan with another... Well, you get the picture.

As the movie progresses, Cotard becomes more and more self obsessed and eventually puts himself into his own play. Cotard's life is so faithfully recreated that, eventually, another actor must be hired to play the actor who is playing Cotard. The doubling and redoubling make watching this movie like looking into a hall of mirrors: baffling, fascinating and hilarious.

There are more visually clever images in this movie than could possibly be commented on in a single blog post. But aside from being clever, Synecdoche is also a serious film with a grim sensibility. It's a terribly sad movie. It's also confusing and strange. But because the film (like Cotard's play) is about life - everyone's life - it needs to be grim and sad and funny and confusing and strange.

Synechdoche, New York is a fascinating, bizarre movie, one that forces the audience to think about it long after they've pressed the 'stop' button on the DVD player.