Movie Review

Synecdoche, New York

Watching “Synecdoche, New York,” I tried to think of all the successful movies I could think of dealing with the subject of self-pity. It’s not something that usually draws a huge crowd at the box office and if you're going to do it at all, and it really is a risky thing, you’ve gotta take a few steps back to reveal a little more about the character other than his own misery. Take “Fight Club,” for example (and it really was the only example I could come up with). It has characters that are basically dealing with shit on top of shit, but there are profound messages the movie makes about the characters and it quickly becomes a masterfully realized slice of life flick. “Synechode, New York” is the opposite. It seems to do nothing quick and by the time it does start to sermonize about the many failures of the human mind, it’s already lost us in a sea of its own layered and over-quantified ways of depression.

It stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard, a theater director obsessed with his own mental ailments. He’s concerned that blood might be in his stool. He sets up appointments with every sort of doctor imaginable. He’s a depressed wreck. So much so that his unhappy wife (Catherine Keener) packs up her and their daughter and leaves for Berlin. Convinced that they aren’t coming back, a now even more unhappy Caden tries again, this time with the actress, Claire (Michelle Williams) in one of his plays. The play actually turns out to be so good that he is given a genius grant to direct an even bigger theater piece in a Manhattan warehouse. His idea is to create a pretentiously overdone play about how much his life has turned to shit. He hires actors to play him and the people around him, including his assistant Hazal (Samantha Morton). He builds replica buildings of the places where he’s made love and the places where he’s had his heart broken. It’s a huge production dedicated mainly to him. Just his growing depression throws his relationships with Claire and Hazal, his life, and his play into even further disarray and before he knows it, he is a very old and sad man.

“Synecdoche” was written by Charlie Kaufman, who’s written some really good movies about alienation and neurotic behavior in the past, in fact all of his characters model one another. Just here he doesn’t seem to be having any fun with them. The movie is endlessly bleak and pretentious. Kaufman layers on Caden’s mental afflictions, his regrets, his melodramatic encounters with the people he pushed away, his crabby inability towards love, and his willingness to let his own emotions eat him alive. And it's all just too much to take. Good actors like Dianne Wiest, Emily Watson, and Tom Noonan are brought in later to play characters playing characters in Caden’s play but by that point the movie is so top heavy with depression that you really do want to kill yourself.

And what’s worse is at times Kaufman seems to want to make this into some kind of quirky comedy but in this he fails even more miserably. Why does Hazal buy a house that’s on fire? Why is a scene involving a death of someone very close to Caden played for laughs about homosexuality? Even for an art-house movie its too broad to really be funny. And this is all really too bad because Philip Seymour Hoffman really invests some soul into this movie. The make-up guys do a good job of aging him through Caden’s tumultuous years but the pain and the hurt is evident in almost every scene Hoffman is in and there are even a few that he makes downright heartbreaking. And Morton is a nice presence as well, cute and comforting. I enjoyed the scenes they had together and thought that Kaufman should have given the relationship between Caden and Hazal more of an arc to make it truly moving.

This also marks Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, and I can’t really say much for it. The screenplay really predicts the mood of this thing from the start and really what bad can you say for the director except maybe the heavy-handedness doesn’t balance out with the comedy at all. But even that feels more like a screenplay criticism. Anyway, I’m criticizing the whole damn thing. It ain’t a good movie. It has a really good performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman but after a while you’ll be so depressed and bored by it that you just won’t care and you’ll want it to be over and done with.

Craig's Grade: C-

A	10.9%
B	41.8%
C	31.8%
D	15.3%
F	0.3%