Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine
Keener, Emily Watson

Director: Charlie Kaufman

Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman

Running time: 2 hrs 4 mins

Genre: Dramas



CRITIQUE:


You’ve got to hand it to Charlie Kaufman. Amid the whippersnappers of Hollywood screenplays that either involves sequels or more explosions, he squeezes out more creative juices and pen something original – if not weird. From the fantastic mind-trip of Being John Malkovich, the sibling frustrations of Adaptation to the heartbreaking assemblage of memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman might have just crafted his most bewildering work yet in Synecdoche, New York. English-arses would have known by now what ‘synecdoche’ means; a figure of speech that stands for a whole e.g. ‘wheels’ for a ‘car’. There is not a more apt title to name this film, as Philip Seymour Hoffman’s lonely playwright, along with hundreds of recruits and actors, recreates the locale of Schenectady, New York after winning a genius grant and abandoned by an equally unhappy wife Adele (Catherine Keener in effortless mode). Hoffman is incredible, bringing an intense, almost harrowing, portrait of loneliness, and his Caden is a masterwork; a writer who desire to infuse reality and brutal honesty to his play, copying real life in the hangar afterwards, so ambitiously driven to exactly photocopy details and fragments of day-to-day trivialities. From Shakespeare’s idiom ‘All the world’s a stage, and all are merely actors in it’, Caden’s intention to infuse his art with life begins to realise that his life, instead, imitates his art.


There are genius touches here: Caden hires an actor to imitate him, but then exposes his exterior flaws unbeknown to him; Hazel (Samantha Morton, subtle and well-cast), the box-office-attendant-turned-lover, is also acted by Tammy (a dismissive Emily Watson), creating doppelgangers, crisscrossing of relationships – all elements that makes life complex and confounding. Whilst all elements do not work (that burning house is just too bizarre and unnecessary to the plot), this is a maddening look into a man’s slow nightmare with illness, aging and eventually death waltzing into his existence. And also, it’s very sad and profound.


VERDICT:

Kaufman’s directorial debut may be a head-scratching, literally bewildering affair, but there’s no denying he remains to be one of America’s greatest purveyor of life’s eccentricities and wonders. Synecdoche, New York is far, very far from being stupid.



RATING: A-