Synecdoche, New York: A Review

Before dulling my anticipation by finally seeing this movie, I decided I should know how to pronounce it before I ordered the ticket. Now, to put into comparison how complex this movie is, the time it took me to pronounce the name was at about an equal ratio before I began fully accepting the Kaufman experience. So let's do the math. It takes approximately one second to say the world, "Synechdoche." It took me twelve seconds to look it up on the internet. So for a one second word, it took me 12 seconds to find out how to say it. Ratio, one to twelve. Compare that to a two hour movie (7200 seconds) and the two days it took to say, "Oh, that's what he was talking about" (86,400 seconds) and you've got a ratio of, you guessed it, one to twelve. Confused? Ya, and I haven't even started reviewing the movie yet.

"Synecdoche" follows the life of a struggling theatre director, played by this decades prince of indie film, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Caden Cotart. At the beginning of the film, Cotart is working on his rendition of "Death of a Salesman" at a local theatre, while his wife, Adele, stays at home with her daughter, Olive, and works on her miniature paintings. Despite good reviews for his play, Cotart becomes increasingly displeased with his work as a director. His ailing health, whether it's made up or not, begins to eat at him and we slowly get the impression of a man who is wanting to make a significant affect on the world.

Before he can start his artistic renewal, however, his wife takes off on him with his daughter to Berlin, on a trip that was only to last one month. While they are away, Caden receives a grant from an arts institution and he decides to make a life size representation of New York City in a warehouse that is in New York City which portrays the actual events of his life.

As the film goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that Adele and Olive are not coming back. Years pass and Cotart's play is still only in the developmental stages, while his daughter is now a pre-teen in Germany, and has numerous tatoos all of her body. She has become a living art exhibit, ironically, much to the dismay of her father. Along the way, Caden gets involved with his assistant and even marries an actress, but as Kaufman likely wants us to see, these are only but side notes to the true story.

As Caden gets increasingly older and more paranoid about his health, his "play" becomes more complex and more impossible to comprehend. He has cast someone to play himself, but after establishing that idea, decided to cast another man to play the actor who is playing himself. This takes place with several characters and Caden slowly slips so far into his production that his life, is in fact, more accurate in the interpretations that it is through his actual living.

Kaufman's first directoral debut is definitely an interesting one. The semi-organized narrative fits what we've seen from Charlie before, especially in his Oscar winning screenplay, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." However, Kaufman didn't seem to want to make the same artisti idea as "Eternal Sunshine" did. This seemed Kaufman's chance to tackle the everlasting questions, "What is art?" and "what is life?", and then throwing them all together in a way only Kaufman can. While the movie sometimes confused even the clearest of thinkers and sometimes lacks an obious direction, overall, it should raise artists in conversation about it's complexities and it's implication.

"Synechdoche, New York"-- 3.5 Stars out of 4