I am a huge Charlie Kaufman fan and when I heard that he had lined up Spike Jonze to direct again I wet my pants with joy, then I saw that he might direct himself because Jonze was too busy and I wet myself with nervous anticipation, then I saw the cast he had and wet myself with joy. Thus when I turned up at the cinema for the London Film Festival screening I was a little smelly and soggy, but still quite excited.
Kaufman being, well, Kaufman, this is a complicated and very very strange film about the nature of identity and how fragile our sense of self can be. Following theatre director Caden Cotard (an on-form Philip Seymour Hoffman) the film shows him struggle through a series of relationship difficulties with a range of women from his long-term artist wife to a young actress and even a box office attendant. All this is further complicated by a crisis prompted by his wife suggesting that he has never done anything original, resulting in the most audacious plan to recreate life itself inside an empty warehouse in New York. The project involves a ridiculous number of actors and spirals out of control as Cotard plunges the depths of his world, treading the fine line between reality and fiction and scouring the myriad moments of banality for the ultimate truth of life.
Lengthy and confusing, SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK is nonetheless a work of immense intellectual power.
The extent to which he pushes the warehouse scenario goes beyond the work of legendary directors like Jacques Rivette on the ‘film within a film’ (CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING) and takes the audience on a journey that is more than a formalist foray into the meaning of film (or indeed theatre) production for its paricipants.
At this point some of the artouse fans out there may be fuming at me, and others may be thinking I’m a pretentious ass to even bring up Rivette, so allow me to try and silence you both by qualifying this remark: Kaufman is showing us a man who is depicting life as a series of staged happenings in order to get to reality, this gets more and more confusing as the line between reality and unreality blur. Whereas Rivette (and others since) have shown this through a detailed and carefully orchestrated cinematic experiment which plays on how much the characters know about their own situation within a film, Kaufman carries us along this journey with a man whose awareness is warped, and whose experiences are easily empathised with by many audience members (at least the more ordinary life crises). By hauling us through Cotard’s life with him Kaufman is giving the audience a frightening glimpse of how frustrating and difficult the experience of real life is, through a cinematic experiment that has thus far only really been used for far more formal (and thus exclusive purposes), a task that should be praised continuously for several decades.
All of this said, it remains a difficult film to keep up with. Making all of these filmic experiments accessible is no easy task, and although some of the more playful elements worked really well early on, I got the feeling that Kaufman was becoming increasingly tangled in his own complex mesh of ideas as the film progressed. This gave me the slightly regrettable feeling that SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK really needed Jonze or, better still, a revived partnership with Michel Gondry, to keep the visual side floing with the quality and excitement that has been brought to instant classic like ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND.
Overall though, this is a film whose merits far outnumber its flaws. An important and intriguing film that must be seen to be believed.
Mike previously reviewed THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD from the LFF HERE.
