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Peter Wild steps into the unique world of Kaufman's directorial debut. Can it hold its head up high in the company of the much-admired films based on his screenplays?

Synecdoche, New York, the third film from writer-director Charlie Kaufman, all but refutes respectable film criticism. Imagine Being John Malkovich (Charlie Kaufman’s first film) found a door that led into the head of Adaptation (Charlie Kaufman’s second film) and the two of them stumbled drunkenly around before finding a third door that emerged, John Malkovich-like, in Charlie Kaufman’s own cranium – such is the beautiful solipsism of Synecdoche, New York.

Ostensibly this is about a man called Caden Cotard (played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who, after being bestowed with a grant given to artistic geniuses, begins work on play like no other: the play of his life.

But as the play of his life unfolds, so his life runs: a marriage to an artist (played by the always wonderful, and wonderfully hangdog Catherine Keener); a relationship with a box-office usherette played by Samantha Morton (who has also gone on record to state that this is the most enjoyable film she has ever worked on); a brief encounter with Emily Watson (who is playing the Samantha Morton character in the play of his life); a final switching of roles with Dianne Wiest, taken on to play a cleaner (with an extensive history of playing theatrical cleaners) but finally assuming the role of Caden Cotard himself.

The film is awash with disease, hypochondria, mis-hearings and mis-sayings, surreal side-steps (Philip Seymour Hofman repeatedly spies himself, in cartoons, TV adverts, hoardings, websites and movie posters, airships occasionally dominate the skyline, Samantha Morton’s character lives in a house a-fire) and percussive oddities (like tummy rumbles and squishy flesh noises). Kaufman’s standard thematic tropes – the Woody Allen-esque spectre of death, the rootless, aimless search for truth – are all in evidence.

A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa – and Synecdoche, New York, is a film, loaded with detail, crammed with significance, that attempts to tell a life in a film. All told, it’s a beautiful, surreal, arthouse oddity, as perplexing and stirring as we’ve come to expect from Kaufman but also unsettlingly poetic, no doubt intentionally divisive and moving too. Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it’s not a film for everyone, but those people who take to it will love it all the fiercer.

 

Peter Wild on 1st September 2009
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