This movie is like being forced to watch a very ugly naked man take a very, very, very long nap. At the beginning, it's boring and a little odd but there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it. As it goes on, however, the boredom turns to frustration as you just want to look away. Then the frustration turns to disgust as every crooked, misshapen aspect imprints itself on your eyes. The disgust shifts into anger at why someone is doing this to you. Finally, the anger dissolves into a bitter, sarcastic resignation that you just have to sit through this inane thing until it's over and you can do something, anything better with your time.
Synecdoche, New York is a bunch of surrealistic blather about mortality, control, identity, the creative impulse and I'm sure a bunch of other high minded concepts that the folks who like this joke of a film would be happy to go on and on and on about. Those fans will insistently tell people like me who loathe this movie that we just "don't get it". The actual reason I didn't enjoy viewing writer/director Charlie Kaufman disappear up his own butt with this self-indulgent, masturbatory tripe isn't that I don't get it. It's that I don't care, because nothing in Synecdoche, New York is rooted in anything real or substantive or insightful.
This fever dream of a story revolves around pudgy Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a guy with a bad haircut who's the director of an undefined theater group. By undefined, I mean it's never clear if he's leading a community theater, a student group, some way-way-way-way-off Broadway production or what. Cotard is also in a desiccated husk of a marriage with Adele (Catherine Keener), an artist who creates paintings the size of stamps. After the movie wastes time giving Caden a lot of obviously metaphorical medical problems, Adle leaves him to go to Berlin and takes their daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein) with her. Caden then gets a MacArthur "genius grant" and uses the money to buy a gigantic warehouse and stage a play that mimic/recreates his own life and the lives of hundreds or thousands of other people. He then spends decades rehearsing that play while a lot of other nonsensical stuff happens, like a guy who inexplicably followed Caden for years showing up to take on the role of Caden in the play.
There's also an unconsummated love affair with a woman who lives in a burning house (incompetent metaphor alert!), a consummated one-night stand when Caden is so old he looks like Hugh Hefner having sex with one of his girlfriends one last time before she turns 30 and he loses interest, an intentionally bizarre tangent where Caden's daughter becomes a tattooed lesbian with a terminal disease and an even more intentionally bizarre subplot where Caden begins playing the role in both real life and his play of a cleaning lady named Ellen who works for Adele. When Dianne Wiest shows up at the end of the movie playing an actress who first takes on the cleaning lady role and then replaces Caden as himself in the enormous warehouse play, all you can do is wave the white flag of surrender to the labored, narcissistic eccentricities of Charlie Kaufman.
There are a few moments when this film doesn't suck and they're all due to the talented and skillful cast. Their work is even more impressive because they might as well have been reading out of a Lithuanian phone book as acting out the meaningless plot, characterization or dialog of Synecdoche, New York. Emily Watson also takes her top off.
Some people may enjoy the sort of deliberately contrived strangeness on display here. I think that when anything can happen in a story, nothing that does happen can have any significance or impact. If it had been revealed at the end of this movie that Caden Cotard was a robot, a hermaphrodite or even his own daughter, it would have made just as much sense as everything else in the film. There's literally NOTHING that would seem wrong, out of place or discordant if it had been stuck in a scene. Caden could have been gang raped by sentient aardvarks, the role of Adele could have been played by an orange tree or the guys from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure could have shown up and I wouldn't have blinked an eye.
If that sounds like the sort of thing you'd like, you're welcome to it.
Synecdoche, New York is a bunch of surrealistic blather about mortality, control, identity, the creative impulse and I'm sure a bunch of other high minded concepts that the folks who like this joke of a film would be happy to go on and on and on about. Those fans will insistently tell people like me who loathe this movie that we just "don't get it". The actual reason I didn't enjoy viewing writer/director Charlie Kaufman disappear up his own butt with this self-indulgent, masturbatory tripe isn't that I don't get it. It's that I don't care, because nothing in Synecdoche, New York is rooted in anything real or substantive or insightful.
This fever dream of a story revolves around pudgy Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a guy with a bad haircut who's the director of an undefined theater group. By undefined, I mean it's never clear if he's leading a community theater, a student group, some way-way-way-way-off Broadway production or what. Cotard is also in a desiccated husk of a marriage with Adele (Catherine Keener), an artist who creates paintings the size of stamps. After the movie wastes time giving Caden a lot of obviously metaphorical medical problems, Adle leaves him to go to Berlin and takes their daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein) with her. Caden then gets a MacArthur "genius grant" and uses the money to buy a gigantic warehouse and stage a play that mimic/recreates his own life and the lives of hundreds or thousands of other people. He then spends decades rehearsing that play while a lot of other nonsensical stuff happens, like a guy who inexplicably followed Caden for years showing up to take on the role of Caden in the play.
There's also an unconsummated love affair with a woman who lives in a burning house (incompetent metaphor alert!), a consummated one-night stand when Caden is so old he looks like Hugh Hefner having sex with one of his girlfriends one last time before she turns 30 and he loses interest, an intentionally bizarre tangent where Caden's daughter becomes a tattooed lesbian with a terminal disease and an even more intentionally bizarre subplot where Caden begins playing the role in both real life and his play of a cleaning lady named Ellen who works for Adele. When Dianne Wiest shows up at the end of the movie playing an actress who first takes on the cleaning lady role and then replaces Caden as himself in the enormous warehouse play, all you can do is wave the white flag of surrender to the labored, narcissistic eccentricities of Charlie Kaufman.
There are a few moments when this film doesn't suck and they're all due to the talented and skillful cast. Their work is even more impressive because they might as well have been reading out of a Lithuanian phone book as acting out the meaningless plot, characterization or dialog of Synecdoche, New York. Emily Watson also takes her top off.
Some people may enjoy the sort of deliberately contrived strangeness on display here. I think that when anything can happen in a story, nothing that does happen can have any significance or impact. If it had been revealed at the end of this movie that Caden Cotard was a robot, a hermaphrodite or even his own daughter, it would have made just as much sense as everything else in the film. There's literally NOTHING that would seem wrong, out of place or discordant if it had been stuck in a scene. Caden could have been gang raped by sentient aardvarks, the role of Adele could have been played by an orange tree or the guys from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure could have shown up and I wouldn't have blinked an eye.
If that sounds like the sort of thing you'd like, you're welcome to it.