Synecdoche Movie Review (3 1/2 Stars)

Most movies fling an audience from A to B to C so that the typical customer response to the average studio product -- "Well, it was OK" -- is elicited and there's a few more ducats in the coffers at the end of the day and no hard feelings. Being taken for a ride in comfortably predictable fashion: That's the idea.

Now and then, though, you encounter a film roomy enough to walk around in, like an art installation. It might get you vexed, or lost. But you might work your way out of the labyrinth to find yourself shaken up and genuinely moved by the experience.

"Synecdoche, New York," the new film from screenwriter and first-time feature director Charlie Kaufman, has provoked an astonishing variety of responses from those who have walked around in it.

Fabulous. Worst film ever. Spellbinding. Like listening to paint dry, while watching someone else watch paint dry. It's an imperfect sprawl, steeped in the juices of artistic torment, romantic nostalgia, a mordant sense of humor and a landscape of "vague regrets and vaguer hopes," as one character puts it.

It sounds like a bummer, and for a lot of folks, it'll be a bummer. I found it bracing, and genuinely in touch with the sweet chaos and ache of life. The directorial debut from the author of such comparatively jaunty existential adventures as "Being John Malkovich," "Adaptation" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" has a tricky story rhythm. Its early, domestically grounded scenes are handled in staccato fashion, shifting around the midpoint to a contemplative legato as its protagonist, a theater director from upstate New York, pours his increasingly bewildering life into an epic performance piece that takes half a lifetime to rehearse. Kaufman's movie is about the difficulty of living and loving and the punch line known as death. "We're the animal that knows it's going to die," as Kaufman said in an interview following the world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. "That's our specialty."

It begins conventionally enough. Caden Cotard, played with a tamped-down desperation by Philip Seymour Hoffman, lives in Schenectady, N.Y., with his wife, Adele (Catherine Keener), and their daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein as a child, Robin Weigert as an adult ). The household is a liberal arts cliche, full of "Morning Edition" on the radio and itchy artistic preoccupations discussed at the breakfast table. Adele works on teeny-tiny canvases in the family basement. Caden's latest project is a revival of "Death of a Salesman," populated by a weirdly underage cast.

The marriage is corroding. With Olive and Adele's vaguely subversive friend Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in tow, Adele takes off to Berlin to find herself and become famous. ("I'm famous!" is how she begins one painful long-distance call back home.) Caden's body, meantime, wages a conspiracy against its owner. Is he dying? Is his marriage worth the struggle, especially if Adele's already cut out with their daughter?

Suddenly a mixed blessing crash-lands into Caden's life, in the form of a MacArthur "genius" grant, enabling him to embark on a theatrical project of bruising honesty and endless self-examination. He rents a warehouse in New York City and re-creates scenes and characters from his rapidly passing life. Hazel, the tempting young woman who worked the box office during "Death of a Salesman," is now Caden's lover, and is played by another woman, Tammy. Caden hires an actor (more of a stalker, really) to play himself. Years seem to pass through wormholes, so that neither Caden nor the audience knows how much time has elapsed between Caden's first marriage and his second.

A synecdoche, pronounced "sin-ECK-de-key," refers to a "part representing the whole" or "the whole symbolizing a part," and as Caden re-creates parts of his memories for a stage extravaganza that will never reach opening night, the film piles riddles atop absurdities atop very real feelings of loss. Hazel lives in a house that is on fire, and not in the metaphorical sense. She tries to make the best of it. Caden, whose last name relates to Cotard's syndrome, a depressive wallow having to do with nihilistic delusions, keeps plodding forward, while his shrink offers little practical help beyond the sale of her latest self-help book.

As a director, Kaufman isn't yet his own best salesman. He's not enough of a visual stylist to sell his script's most challenging conceits. But the cast rises to a very strange and rich occasion. The women's roles actually count for something in this film, and in addition to Keener, Samantha Morton as the goggle-eyed dear Hazel, and Emily Watson as Tammy, the actress hired to play her in Caden's Pirandellian show, deliver honest bits of reality amid the craziest artifice. Dianne Wiest enters the action as a famous actress who plays, at one point, Caden, while assuming a stage-manager-as-God role in other scenes.

When you see "Synecdoche, New York" -- and you should, even though I know a solid percentage of any audience will haaaaaate it -- watch how Kaufman and editor Robert Frazen handle the scenes with Hope Davis as the shrink, cutting off the ends of the acidly amusing dialogue exchanges so that things seem not quite "real" or "normal." The entire film contains elements of a dream, or a trance. It is a dying fall, but a living, breathing one.

About Synecdoche

MPAA rating: R (for language and some sexual content/nudity).

Running time: 2:03.

Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman (Caden Cotard); Samantha Morton (Hazel); Michelle Williams (Claire); Catherine Keener (Adele); Emily Watson (Tammy); Dianne Wiest (Ellen Bascomb/Millicent Williams); Jennifer Jason Leigh (Maria); Hope Davis (Madeleine Gravis); Tom Noonan (Sammy).

Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman; photographed by Frederick Elmes; edited by Robert Frazen; music by Jon Brion; production design by Mark Friedberg; produced by Anthony Bregman, Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonze and Sidney Kimmel. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Synecdoche Movie Trailer

About Synecdoche, New York

"Synecdoche, New York" is a 2008 film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman. It stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard, a struggling theater director who is awarded a prestigious grant to create a piece of new theater.

As Caden embarks on his project, his life becomes increasingly entangled with the characters and themes of his play. He hires actors to portray himself, his family, and his acquaintances, and the lines between reality and fiction begin to blur. As the play evolves, it grows more and more ambitious, eventually encompassing not just the theater but an entire replica of New York City.

Throughout the film, Kaufman explores themes of mortality, identity, and the nature of art. The movie is known for its complex and unconventional storytelling style, with multiple layers of narrative and a surrealistic approach to time and space.

"Synecdoche, New York" received critical acclaim for its bold and inventive approach to filmmaking, and its exploration of deep and complex themes. It has been hailed as one of the best movies of the 21st century, and a landmark work of art.

Theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is mounting a new play. His life catering to suburban blue-hairs at the local regional theater in Schenectady, New York is looking bleak. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) has left him to pursue her painting in Berlin, taking their young daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein) with her. His therapist, Madeleine Gravis (Hope Davis), is better at plugging her best-seller than she is at counseling him. A new relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel (Samantha Morton) has prematurely run aground. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one.

Worried about the transience of his life, he leaves his home behind. He gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in New York City, hoping to create a work of brutal honesty. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a growing mockup of the city outside.

However, as the city inside the warehouse grows, Caden's own life veers wildly off the tracks. Somewhere in Berlin, his daughter is growing up under the questionable guidance of Adele's friend, Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh). His lingering attachments to both Adele and Hazel are causing him to helplessly drive his new marriage to actress Claire (Michelle Williams) into the ground. Sammy (Tom Noonan) and Tammy (Emily Watson), the actors hired to play Caden and Hazel, are making it difficult for the real Caden to revive his relationship with the real Hazel. The textured tangle of real and theatrical relationships blurs the line between the world of the play and that of Caden's own deteriorating reality.

The years rapidly fold into each other, and Caden buries himself deeper into his masterpiece. As he pushes the limits of his relationships, both personally and professionally, a change in creative direction arrives in Millicent Weems (Dianne Wiest), a celebrated theater actress who may offer Caden the break he needs.

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Synecdoche Movie Review stars Philip Seymour Hoffman & Samantha Morton

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