Synechdoche, New York - It's unfiltered Kaufman at it's best (and worst)

Charlie Kaufman has been involved in the likes of hyper-original and seminal masterpieces (Adaptation, Being John Makovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).

All of these movies feature miserable losers and mismatched lovers, but it is the intelligence and sensitivity, and the sheer creative freshness, that shines through. Kaufman is Woody Allen on speed: less nerdy, sharper and, well...better.

First, the title. Synechdoche. You say it like this: si-NEK-duh-kee. It's a metaphor of a sort, where a part is referred to as a whole, or the whole refers to a part. For example:

The White House said... (refering to a few government insiders).
The blonde in the red dress...
Nice wheels...
Cuba scored a home run...

Kaufman renders New York in the story, and his 13 million inhabitants refer to the world (or Kaufman's at least). Kaufman sees each person as the lead role in their lives, no one is an extra. But be warned - Kaufman's movie, unfiltered, becomes very emotionally draining.

Synechdoche. It's the perfect title for Kaufman's story, because it is a self-reflecting story, shooting off in a myriad of increasingly fragmented (but somehow cohesive), often ambiguous directions. One device Kaufman uses here that he has not employed before is leaping through entire lifetimes of his characters, forwards, backwards, forwards. Not a few days, weeks or months, but from childhood to adulthood, adulthood to the very last days of their lives.

For the bulk of this film, many viewers will probably keep up. I believe it was Kaufman's intention to overwhelm the audience, so that eventually they get lost in the size and complicated scope of the film, just as the deteriorating Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) eventually gets consumed by the girth of his theatre project. The question is: did Kaufman get overwhelmed by telling this mammoth story, or did we?

There are some fascinating asides in Synechdoche, among them the silly ambiguities Cotard has to deal with [''No' I'm not dying, or 'No' you can't tell me?']. The casting, as in all kaufman's flicks, is outstanding.
The 4 year old daughter of the theatre director, Olive (Sadie Goldstein)is delightful. Cotard's rebellious (and apparently bisexual) wife Adele (Catherine Keener) is an artist who flees with Cotard's daughter to Germany.
We get some relief from all the misery through Hazel (Samantha Morton), except that her house remains of fire for the duration of the story.

Despite the happy quirks, the tragicomedy and the emotional authenticity Kaufman embues (in his directorial debut), Synechdoche becomes increasingly deep, dark and profoundly miserable. Much of Kaufman's misery is darkly funny, all of it is fantastically complicated.

Kaufman at turns demonstrates the creeping sickness in society. That everything we eat is sick, making us sick. He veers off this topic into the sickness of our thoughts - the mental malaise that is each person's melodrum of madness. There was also the disturbia lurking in the background - the violence and anarchy that is growing behind the walls. This is Kaufman's dystopian view of where the world beyond our immediate experience is manifesting.

Kaufman wants to show everything - the whimsy, the irony, the dreariness, the loneliness, the love, the loss, the dystopia, the joy of living. He wants to mix it up and mess it up in the way life is messed up. Life is filled with hope and despair, disordered, something beautiful, often gross, sometimes grossly funny. It's confusion with a few stepping stones that make sense through the whirling humdrum of it all. But overall, it's an unholy miserable mess which Kaufman renders with some elegance.

There is some sex and a lot of death, and Kaufman broods on the death part. There are plenty of funerals in this film. Even an extra gets his own funeral. The message is that specifics are not important, even if the specifics of our own circumstances are what we claim to define us. In the scheme of things, specifics don't matter. Nothing matters. Everything resembles everything else, and spills into everything else.

Whether the unbearability aspect was intentional, I'm not sure. But there is a point where the film starts to fall apart. It unravels, becomes less relevant. I considered walking out of the film, just because I was becoming less comfortable watching it. I don't know if it was his intention to show this as a metaphor for life that sometimes seems so fleeting, other times it drags on unbearably, as life must in old age and infirmity.

Don't bother trying to understand it, or try to make sense of it. Just appreciate that each character is the leading role in their movie, and that none of the movies they're living matter. Nothing matters (have I already said that - this film does that a lot), and everything matters - and in that dichotomy lies an answer to the meaning we give our lives, and we impart to others.

In the apparent random chaos of life we will ask ourselves, from time to time, what all of this means. That is perhaps the only important question, even if the answer eludes us. This is the Synechdoche Kaufman wrestles with, and wrestles it to the floor.

9/10