Synecdoche, New York

Charlie Kaufman wrote Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — all great, all successful — then turned director with Synecdoche, which is a masterpiece and which basically went unseen.

Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), an intellectual, a theatre director, living well off-off Broadway and apparently in a state of severe physical and spiritual disintegration. Caden is trying not to notice that his wife (Catherine Keener) is in love with another woman, but he’s acutely aware that he’s sick with… something… and he’s nervous as heck about his new production of Death of a Salesman. On the semi-positive side, the box office manager Hazel (Samantha Morton) has a crush on him, and his lead actress, Claire (Michelle Williams) also seems keen. Unfortunately Caden doesn’t have the life skills to juggle an unhappy marriage and an affair, or two.

Although existential dread is very much the order of the day, Charlie Kaufman’s mordant sense of humour is much in evidence, especially in the strain of surrealist absurdism that keeps breaking through the surface, until, in fact, it becomes the surface. Hazel goes house-hunting and gets a great deal on a little two bedroom place because of the fire smouldering out of control in the living room — it’s a permanent feature that she learns to put up with. Caden wins a prestigious and lucrative grant to mount a theatre piece from scratch — and settles on a dramatization of his own life story. But not a period piece — this is the theatre of life, evolving and mutating as it becomes infected with his present.

Synecdoche, New York sprawls and confounds and infuriates — but it’s a genuinely courageous film and an aberration in terms of contemporary American cinema for its sense of creative risk. And here’s the thing: for all its sophistication, it’s also a deeply accessible picture about nothing more than a man who tries and fails to get a hold on his own destiny; who tries and fails to transcend his own limitations; who tries and fails to establish meaningful connections with other people. Of course it was a flop, how could it not be? But I suspect most of us can find something to relate to in this story if we care to admit it.

Aug 30: Intro by filmmaker and critic Chris Beaubien

I think you have to see Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York twice. I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film and that I had not mastered it. The second time because I needed to. The third time because I will want to. It will open to confused audiences and live indefinitely.

Roger Ebert

Astonishing. Kaufman has surpassed himself with a film that will delight and confound. You will want to see it again. And again.

Andrew Male, Empire