Synecdoche, New York: 118 minutes. Rated: M. Director: Charlie Kaufman. Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams
Recently I have been practising my pronunciation of the word synecdoche (si-neck-duh-kee), and trying to come up with an easy working definition. That task is itself synecdochic of trying to explain what Synecdoche, New York is all about.
A thumbnail synopsis might read as follows: Caden Cotard (Hoffman) is a theatre director. Awarded a grant and artistic carte blanche, he sets about producing the most ambitious play in history, building an immense New York set within a vast warehouse and hiring thousands of actors to populate it with the everyday lives of its citizens.
His cast of characters includes himself and those nearest to him, play-acting the events of his domestic life while the director looks on. Is it all part of his grand ambition and the integrity of his art? Or an overblown exercise in self-indulgent self-examination? Probably a bit of both. Inevitably, sooner or later reality and fiction start to blur.
Thematically, fans of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman will find this familiar territory. The cannibalistic tendencies of self-obsessed artists are a staple of the Kaufman diet. In Being John Malkovich a puppeteer finds a portal into the mind of a famous actor, and takes over the controls. In Adaptation, a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman, suffering from writers block, writes himself into the screenplay he's been commissioned to write.
Familiar, too, will be Kaufman's playful approach to 'reality'. Aware that films are, by their nature, already at a remove from reality, Kaufman, with seeming reverence for David Lynch, adds additional layers of 'unreality' between audience and characters. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind physicalises the memories of the film's protagonist. In Adaptation, you are watching a movie about the process of writing the movie you are watching.
In Synecdoche, New York Kaufman, as first-time director, takes his conceptual aspirations to fuggy new depths. The film is thick with symbols and dense with ideas. There is an internal logic to Kaufman's convoluted opus, but not much in the way of lineal, literal meaning.
The title is a clue. Linguists and logophiles might know that a synecdoche is a figure of speech where a part is used to describe the whole, or the whole to describe a part. So, 'per head' is 'per person', while to 'use your head' to solve a problem is to 'use your