Synecdoche, New York (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Dianne Wiest, Catherine Keener) — I am so glad my son has a PhD in neuroscience and a medical degree because now I have someone with an outside chance at understanding the mind of writer/director Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman is the most daring and creative writer in Hollywood; some might say he’s “nuts.” His previous films were all studies of the human mind: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Human Nature. Actors want to work his screenplays. And for the first time, he becomes a director of this “play” on words, Synecdoche, New York. A synecdoche is a figure of speech where one uses a part to describe the whole (like “all hands on deck”) or a whole to describe a part. There is relevance to the title here — I mean, I’m not sure I can figure it out but I am sure my son can. Set initially in Schenectady, New York, this starts as the story of a regional theater director, Caden Cotard, (Hoffman) who is an artist with more than a few mental (and, seemingly a plethora of) physical issues. His wife, Adele (Keener), a brilliant artist who miniaturizes her work, leaves with their four-year-old daughter, to show her art in Berlin and never returns. But the plot doesn’t much matter here.
The plot is the human adventure known as life with the director merely serving as the vessel for Kaufman’s and, thus, our self-examination into life — your loves, your friends, your fantasies, your hallucinations, your dreams, your fears, your paranoia, your happiness, your hopelessness, your alter-egos and everything else you can think of. Kaufman is one very smart and/or very weird dude. Separating Cotard’s actual life from his imagined one is for you to decipher. Realizing that he is a very morose, unfinished, self-possessed, disturbed, and lifeless person is clear. But that’s about all about this movie that is. Prepare to work hard during the movie. You’ll need to try to figure out what Kaufman is symbolizing with the house owned by the director’s assistant and love that is perpetually on fire. Or what is he trying to depict with the mammoth new production Cotard is staging in New York City with myriad sets on multiple levels exploring his own life.
This film is true art, and Kaufman obviously felt he needed to stage it himself, hence his decision to direct as well as write. Thus, you get exactly the movie he wants to tell you. I just want to spend a couple of hours with him to ask what he was trying to say or whether he was smoking something quite potent while he was writing this.