What’s It All About, Charlie?

[November 12th, 2008]

Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is the year’s most frightening, confusing and astounding movie because it understands why life is frightening, confusing and astounding—not because nothing happens, as is so often the complaint, but because everything happens. Maybe it’s different for you: Maybe when you measure out your life, it still fits into ordered narratives, and those stories please you. Not me. I am anxious and I am narcissistic and I am afraid. Maybe that’s why no movie this year has moved me so deeply as this one, about a man who is so overwhelmed by life that he is compelled to re-enact it down to the last breath in a work of art.

So many “I”s, so much self-indulgence. A friend of mine left Synecdoche, New York sighing that Charlie Kaufman had made a movie that only Charlie Kaufman would want to watch. But Kaufman has always been self-obsessed: As a screenwriter, his favorite image was the ouroboros—the snake swallowing its own tail. His scripts (the meta-storytelling of Adaptation, the hall-of-mirrors memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) mingled vast imagination with an agonizing consciousness of the futility of any new invention. As Kaufman assumes the director’s chair, these fixations have grown more pronounced: Synecdoche, New York is decked out with all the filigrees of magical realism—a house perpetually on fire, a child’s diary that continues recording entries even after the girl leaves it behind, tattoos that shed purple rose petals—but there is no cutesiness, only the reek of inevitable death. The more whimsical the nonsense gets, the more menacing it feels—like the lethal gibberish recited by Lewis Carroll’s Walrus and Carpenter.

Yes, yes, but what’s it about? Well, it concerns a Schenectady theater director, Caden Cotard (a deflated Philip Seymour Hoffman), who loses his wife (Catherine Keener) and daughter (Sadie Goldstein) and at about the same time gets a MacArthur “genius” grant, which he uses as a means to replace them—buying an enormous, derelict airplane hangar and using it to restage every moment of his life. He casts an eager actor (Tom Noonan) to play him (conveniently, the man has been following Caden for 20 years) and casts another actor to play the actor playing him, and so ad infinitum. When Caden marries again, he simplifies matters by casting his second wife (Michelle Williams) as herself. This choice doesn’t bring the play any closer to completion. After some 20 years, a second hangar has to be constructed inside the first one.

Of course, Caden is constantly being asked what the whole exercise is about, and he always thinks he’s on the cusp of an answer. “It’s not just about death; it’s also about dating,” he explains at one juncture. That would suggest the puzzle could be solved by the mousy ticket-counter girl Hazel (Samantha Morton, luminous). But then again, it might just be about death after all, as poor Mr. Cotard, living up to his name (a play on Cotard delusion, the belief that one’s body is putrefying), pokes at his bloody feces and visits a series of doctors who confirm that something is indeed very, very wrong with him. So the production’s name keeps changing: For a while, it’s Simulacrum, then Infectious Diseases in Cattle.

As these titles suggest, there are a lot of jokes in Synecdoche (the title is only the first of a tsunami of homophones, puns and misunderstandings), but the laughs catch in the throat. For all its complexities, Kaufman’s movie is basically an inversion of The Truman Show, with the main character fully aware that his existence is a fake, and hoping that by controlling the artifice, he can give it some meaning. Always, there’s the enticing hope of reaching enlightenment, but it fades into paltry repetition: The play’s central moral emerges as the realization, “There are millions of people in the world, and none of those people is an extra,” but after several more rehearsals, it curdles into a graveside benediction of “Fuck everybody, amen.” Synecdoche, after all, is the literary device that uses a part of something to represent its whole—but what is the whole of living? The epiphanies are fleeting, the disappointments endure, and everything keeps happening until it doesn’t.

Synecdoche, New York felt just like life: None of it made any sense, and it broke my heart.