An Examined Life

To say that writer-director Charlie Kaufman’s latest, Synecdoche, New York, is labyrinthine is to imply that the movie’s many twists and outlandish turns have a satisfying ending.

This movie’s the wrong kind of a head-scratcher, and they do not.

Synecdoche, New York starts out strong, I’ll admit, but it soon becomes evident that Kaufman, who makes his directorial debut with another presumably brilliant script of his own, can’t quite…focus.

He doesn’t waste time setting the stage, though, which is deeply appreciated: Caden Cotard (the fantastic Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a desperate husband and father living in Schenectady, N.Y., who begins experiencing ill health just as he is mounting a new play, his first non-adaptation, if memory serves.

His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) is a painter of small tableaux who has left him to pursue a career in Berlin, taking their young daughter Olive with her. His shrink, Madeleine Gravis (Hope Davis), is more interested in plugging her books than she is in counseling him. And his box office girl Hazel (Samantha Morton) has made it very clear that she is in love with him, although their relationship quickly runs its course.

As he tries to understand the mysterious condition that is slowly shutting down each of his autonomic functions, Caden begins to worry about the transience of his life, and leaves the ’burbs for New York City, where thanks to a genius grant, he gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse, hoping to stage a work of staggering and brutal honesty.

He directs his troupe in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a growing mockup of the city outside. For decades, Caden mines his own life to create a masterpiece that forever will remain unseen by an audience. He is unable to stop examining, deconstructing, and recreating his own life, and can’t keep from going deeper and creating smaller warehouses within the original one, in order to understand who he is.

This tangle of real and theatrical relationships blurs the line between the world of the play and Caden’s own crumbling reality – this, after all, is a Kaufman movie.

And by the time someone in the production tries to streamline the story, I can all but guarantee that you will have started praying for the curtain call on this one.

Synecdoche, New York – not the destination I was expecting, and certainly not somewhere I necessarily got. It’s a fantasy, indeed, a place that doesn’t exist. The same rules do not apply – I mean, a character lives in a house that’s literally on fire – but that doesn’t mean the point of the movie had to be so deeply buried underneath the surface of so much…quirk.

My Rating *1/2

Photo: SlashFilm.com.