Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a neurotic stage director whose life is falling apart. Charlie Kaufman is a neurotic film director whose movie is falling apart. You see, Caden is a Kaufman stand-in (if not as transparent a stand-in as Nicolas Cage’s character in Adaptation who was named... Charlie Kaufman), and Synecdoche, New York is best described as an auteur taking a journey through his own mind by using various stand-ins to represent various aspects of his life. Caden has several stand-ins of his own as he spends decades developing a play based on his own life, eventually creating a life-sized replica of New York City in the process.
You see how this movie is. It’s like watching a TV which shows you watching a TV showing yourself watching TV, watching a TV which shows you watching a TV showing yourself watching TV, watching... yeah, you’re starting to get the idea. Caden is watching himself direct a play which shows him watching himself directing a play, and so on and so forth. It’s a movie that folds in on itself so many times that suddenly we question if it even exists.
It’s not just about the staging of a play. It’s actually hard to describe Synecdoche, New York in any way that does it justice; it’s really a movie about everything and everyone, a movie about being. But if that sounds a little too heady for you, I’ll try to break it down, as much as I can without spoiling the film’s magic.
Caden’s four-year-old daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein) thinks she sees something green in her poop, but her mother Adele (Catherine Keener) dismisses it and hurries her to get ready for school. Then, as Caden is reading the newspaper, he sees Olive watching a TV cartoon about Mr. Virus, and suddenly sees an animated avatar of himself. He goes to work, where he’s directing a production of Death of a Salesman in which the old characters are played by young actors. The secretary, Hazel (Samantha Morton), obviously feels something for him; she’s sweet and light, in contrast to Adele’s coldness and restlessness.
Soon Caden begins sporting pustules on his face, and when Adele takes Olive and leaves him for Germany, he is wracked with convulsions, slipping into some unknown terminal illness. This is when he starts work on the play of his life — he comes up with a new title every day — and when he starts a relationship with Hazel. Hazel has her own demands, ones which intimidate Caden just as much as Adele’s. There’s also Michelle Williams as Claire Keen, an actress who becomes another prominent woman in Caden’s life. There were a few points during the movie where I wondered if all three women were meant to represent one woman in Caden’s and/or Kaufman’s life, or all women. Or maybe they’re just supposed to be those three characters.
Article comments
1 - handyguy
I agree with you. I have found that quite a few other people, however, think the film is slow, overlong, repetitious and tedious.
From an audience-pleasing point of view, it's possibly a mistake to start with a relatively fast and funny half-hour, and then get gloomier and stranger for the remaining two hours.
But this isn't a mistake artistically: it's a mind-blower of a film.
2 - Arlo J. Wiley
I agree, this is a hard movie to watch. But it makes no compromises artistically, and what Kaufman does is very brave.
Also, some movies that try to be big and arty are oftentimes pretentious and boring, which Synecdoche never was.