Synecdoche, New York

Charlie Kaufman’s new movie Synecdoche, New York was screened last night at the River East theater as part of the Chicago International Film Festival. Kaufman himself, who wrote and directed the picture, was in attendance, and a Q & A with him followed the film.

Synecdoche (pronounced Sin-eck-doe-kee) is about a theater director named Caden (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), who lives in New York and is always in fear of death, a major theme of the movie. His plan is to use an abandoned warehouse to build a life size replica of New York and have the people inhabit and play out the various lives of real people.

The movie is dreamlike, set in a surreal world where so many things don’t make sense. The movie contains some 200 scenes set in two-hour running time, and years pass like nothing, mere afterthoughts to these characters. Indeed this is both an annoying and captivating film.

The film definitely stays with you and you think about it long after it is over. I still haven’t concluded whether I liked the film or not; I go between loving it and hating it within the same minute sometimes. It’s really a force of a movie to be reckoned with, and I recommend people see it just to purely talk about the themes addressed in the movie. It’s a smart film, but one feels Kaufman, who was given final cut on this project, needed some restraints to scale it back maybe just a touch.

Kaufman’s Q & A afterwards actually helped me understand some of the obscure elements of the film, but he mostly dismissed “what does this mean” questions by saying you should interpret it the way you want it. What I thought was bold was him saying that he doesn’t care whether you like it or not, it is his vision that he has put out there for anyone who cares to see it to, and love it or hate it.

Previous scripts by Kaufman include Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002) and of course Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). He is definitely one of the best screenwriters out there in Hollywood today, and though I have some misgivings about this latest piece, I think it is definitely worth checking out, even if it is the least accessible of his movies.