I still haven't seen this, I'm ashamed to admit. However, there has been a duel about if the film is "good" or not. Here Adrienne Aggen weighs in.This movie exhausted me. Ruined me. Had me in fits. Tearing at my arm hair.
I imagine other people feel like this too, but I am going to make a wild guess that they don't take the time to figure out what it all means to them. Because they're so unquestionably mind-blown afterwards that they just want to go home and soak in some long, hot, VH1. No pretense about it, Synecdoche, New York is work. Hard work. I don't know how comfortable I'd feel filing it away under "entertainment." It kind of feels more like doing a research project.
But this theme of the hard-working movie works, because the premise deals with one of the most emotionally taxing professions – artist. In this case, writer. The film is quick to remind us that being a creative person is rewarding but hardly the glamorous kick in the park it looks like. You can't turn your brain off. Ever. You're never done. It's not like you finish up at the office and then start the project the next day. No, you're constantly making mental notes and revisions and it's enough to drive a woman Sylvia Plath.
Even when the project is done, it's still not done. "A [poem] is never finished, only abandoned." Cliché, but true. You then have to have a maddening post-mortem, where you regret half of your creative choices and play the "if-only" game until you collapse in a pool of your own, wasted brain matter. I really can't think of anyone who works more than the artist, but enough about me, let's talk about the movie!
Well, actually that is kind of a quick sum-up of the premise. This concept of the ever-constant-Work, this blurred line between one's work and one's life is hammered upon with great skill, played by the always genuine Philip Seymour Hoffman as the messy but ambitious playwright Caden Cotard. You see, Caden's personal life is in shambles. His body is falling prey to diseases of every kind including bowel troubles, blood issues, sycosis (the homonym all too prescient and suggestive).
These scenes afflict us with some scatological icks, but they're much more tolerable than the Apatow brand of potty humor, and are appropriate for a movie about decay. After all, as Caden soon learns, we are human. We are temporary. We are our own carbon-based sets, prone to disease and discomfort and likely to collapse at any moment. And Caden is literally his own, fragile, walking theater piece.
His relationships are also fraying at the seams. His wife (Catherine Keener) is finding artistic success and trading her husband's affections for those of Berlin artsters, taking their young daughter Olive with her to saddening consequences.
This leaves Caden lonely, though admired by a bright young assistant (the always captivating Samantha Morton) and by the theater community at large, the latter all but saving his suddenly bleak life by tossing him a prestigious McCarthur grant. With this financial backing, Caden can now do something more important, more personal than the stage plays he's been translating in recent years. And he turns inward, taking inspiration from his life and his life alone.
What follows really proves to Caden and to the audience the certain inescapability of autobiography. We cannot help throwing ourselves into our work, and he cuts all the corners and takes this very literally. We then watch the following hour and a half and explore "Caden", keen as mustard to turn his life into his masterpiece, not realizing his life is already his masterpiece. And it takes him the whole 2 hours and 20 minutes before this concept finally jells in that disturbed, creative brain of his.
Instead, he undergoes the expensive and time consuming learning process and rents a huge Brooklyn warehouse and fills it with the junk and neuroses of his life. He creates exact replicas of his apartment and nearby haunts, casts his real life wife, ingénue Claire (Michelle Williams - who just keeps getting better as she grows into herself) as the wife of the Playwright. Further on he casts actors to play the Actors to play Actors for this play with in a play within a play. It could get confusing in this respect, and it does. But it's still always well-communicated, it's just like you need to pause the film, figure it out for a few minutes, and then press play again.
It's a funny movie, too. Caden's inability to totally control his actors and his assistants make for unexpectedly hilarious turns, as they help in rewriting the play of his life. He is the director of his play, but like a God, his players still have the will to be their own agents. This process is very organic for life, but not for the controlled environment of a stage, and this stresses out the already stressed Caden. But the humor is well-placed and smart, and it makes sense at the end that the story of all of our little lives are both tragedies and comedies. This is just my take, but I actually think Kaufman is pretty charitable to the often sad state of the human life. He loves Caden and hates Caden at the same time, and maybe this is just more than a bit self-reflective.
At about the halfway mark, play and life become completely interchangeable, and you can just see Kaufman snickering in the wings, adding another layer to this meta-madness. I think for the writer-director, like his protagonist Caden, this was his way of self-analyzation. He needed to create to understand himself. But it's unclear whether he finds it ultimately worthwhile. Is he praising art, or shaming it for it's obsolescence? In the end is Art insignificant or is it all that matters? I think he is torn, and this is partially why it's so complex.
Art. Just the word exhausts me, too. You know, the longest (ongoing) argument I've ever been in attempts to assign a "correct" definition to this concept and to classify, demystify, spiritualize, contextualize, and hyperanalyze it. And the leitmotif of this argument being: Does Art need an audience to be Art? What if—like those old Chinese poets who scribbled down poems and sent them down the river on origami boats, never to be seen by any other eyes—the art I create is just for myself - a commune between me and my God - is this not art? Or is it just artistic masturbation? Do I need an audience? Is the art I want to create founded in the Calvinist school of thought or is it not? Do I create to glorify God, self, or both? Or to understand self? Or all of these things? These are things that I guess run through other people's mind besides mine, to name a few Kauffman and the fictional? Caden.
In the end, it presents all the needed ingredients to give it Oscar nods, especially and unsurprisingly Best Orioginal Screenplay. It also benefits from an indie dreamboat cast (lookout for a knockout performance by Dianne Weist). I can't fathom the negative, "vanity-project" reviews it's getting. Don't all stories eventually reflect our own artistic credo? I see this then, less as a vanity project, and more as something very close to Truth. Microscopically, macroscopically (whatever it takes) trying to discover who we are through what we make and our role as Grand Creators – the closest we'll get as mortals to becoming Gods, even though even our "controlled" environments still belong to something greater. Thematically, it spoke to me (clearly). Haunted me in a way (hence the feeling like I HAD to write something about it, "*en muss sein.)" It's stimulates in a way that most movies don't – artistically, intellectually, spiritually.
And I dare you not have at least an hour of conversation about it afterward.
* Geez. Kundera, what a jerk I am.
