MALLINation

Hoffman, Noonan and Williams

It’s hard for me to remember a film with as divergent a critical response as Synecdoche, New York which made many reviewers best and worst films of 2008 lists at the end of the year. I can sympathize with those who didn’t enjoy the film – to its credit it never even tries to meet a mainstream audience halfway. Though it’s production values are on par with the best Hollywood has to offer this bears as much relation to a Summer blockbuster as as orangutan does to an aphid.

Instead what we get is a delightfully rich, touching, funny and tragic exploration of what it means to be alive and to create. It’s a surreal and magic world of that comes from the mind of acclaimed screenwriter and first-time director Charlie Kaufman. In tone it’s a mixture of Kurt Vonnegut’s wry desperation and Thomas Pynchon’s matter-of-fact abstraction and head-case humor.

Kaufman has already shown himself to be a screenwriter with a rare vision, and the themes he explores here have their roots in his breakthrough films Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, all of which asked similar questions on the very nature of why we are who we are. Not bad for a guy who started out writing episodes of the Thomas Haden Church/ Deborah Messing sitcom Ned and Stacey.

A synecdoche is a figure of speech that uses a part of something to represent a whole (ie saying “I count ten heads” rather than “ten cows”. ) It’s what Kaufman tries to do with his film, represent the whole crazy quilt of life for 2 hours onscreen. It is also, in turn, what Philip Seymour Hoffman tries to do as playwright and stage director Caden Cotard.

At first I felt dread at seeing Hoffman give a mumbly deadened portrayal of a man ground down by life – I’d seen it already in Happiness. Yet Hoffman adds layer after layer until his character becomes moving in his lostness.

“I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That’s what I want to explore. We’re all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we’re going to die, each of us secretly believing we won’t…”

This is what he becomes obsessed with, particularly after winning an unexpected MacArthur Genius Grant after his wife (played with her usual whip-smart edge by Katharine Keener) decamps with possible lover Jennifer Jason Leigh and young daughter Olive for Berlin.

He uses the grant to build yet another synecdoche, a replica of New York City inside an enormous warehouse which eventually includes another warehouse within which resides another replica and so on. He similarly populates his replica city with replicas of himself, and his would-be lover played by Samantha Morton in a breakthrough performance.

So used am I to seeing Morton’s big eyes and delicate features to project gloom in such films as Minority Report that seeing her as a flirty, implusive fun-lover comes as a revelation.

It’s important to note that the movie starts off somewhat realistically with a painfully real accounting of Hoffman and Keener’s marriage and becomes more and more unhinged in time and reality once she takes off.

17 years pass in the blink of an eye, and not even Hoffman seems to realize it. There are hints that what transpires might all be his fantasy of his life while he waits for his wife’s return – A Wizard of Oz like ascent to unreality where the needy female lead of his revival of Death of a Salesman (a tricky role effortlessly handled by Michelle Williams) becomes his second bride, and his couples therapist morphs into an oddly omniscient self-help author (Hope Davis, with a  twinkle in her eye.) There are also hints that he may even be dead already.

It can be hard to tell since all linearity is seemingly throw out the window. Scenes that play as funny and offbeat have payoffs deeper into the movie as you realize that some of the odd disconnect comes from descriptions of later events.

On the other hand, the film is entirely linear. The early scenes are poop, piss and blood obsessed, a Freudian glossary of childhood. Appropriately enough they often center around Cotard’s daughter Olive who is alternately fearful and fascinated by what goes into and comes out of the human body.

As the film progresses so does decay – Hoffman’s body, the giant sets he creates, even Morton’s house. It’s an inspired and for some, off-putting touch of surreality when she buys a new house that comes complete with fire – but not in the fireplace. It’s the kind of visual wordplay Kaufman revels in – she is something of an old flame after all. It’s also a visual link to site specific artwork like that of Andy Goldsworthy who creates things like symmetrical leaf trails knowing that they will decay and return to nature. Part of the art is the transience of it.

So rich and loaded is Synecdoche, New York with symbols and meaning that it seems churlish to try to capture it in a mere blog post, just as Cotard and no doubt Kaufman strain against the limits of their means of expression to represent the fullness of what it means to be alive. I’m painfully aware that I’ve barely hinted at the great performances within from the likes of Tom Noonan (more than 20 years after his brilliant turn in Michael Mann’s Manhunter), Diane Wiest, and Emily Watson.

Then there are the special effects that create a warehouse big enough to house a dirigible in the sky, and the breathtaking cinematography by Frederick Elmes who also shot Blue Velvet.

This is a film that may be seen as a flop and even a career killer for Kaufman, one that didn’t even make back half of it’s paltry $21 million box office. Twnety years from now however I predict it may very well be remembered as one of the best films of the century’s first decade.