“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…they have their exits, and their entrances…”
William Shakespeare’s famous line, from his play As You Like It, seems to be the existentialist wind that pushes forth Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), a misanthropic playwright in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. A film that has divided critics and audiences, Synecdoche is certainly one of the boldest and most brilliant films I have seen in quite some time, so much so that the physical DVD should be locked away in a cabinet somewhere. The ideas about death, life, and art are perhaps too fierce for our mortal minds to handle, a welcome feeling compared with much of the fare gracing cineplexes these days.
Charlie Kaufman’s previous screenwriting credits, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, are far-reaching metaphysical tragedies, disconserting contemplations on the human condition. If you thought they were at all morose, Synecdoche will knock you over- Caden is left by his wife Adele (Catherine Keener), who takes their daughter Olive to Berlin. He becomes convinced that he is dying, and after receiving a MacArthur Grant, sets to work on arguably his, and mankind’s, most ambitious dramatic production- an unnamed project that requires a full-scale set of New York City in an old airport hanger.
All is surreal in the film; Caden’s box office attendant Ellen (Samantha Morton) lives in a house that is perpetually on fire. Caden finds Olive’s diary underneath her bed, and it seems to fill out as the years pass, even as Olive is somewhere deep in Berlin. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Maria, friend of Adele’s, who prevents Caden from finding his daughter. Meanwhile, his untitled project continues to gain momentum, requiring more actors and more set pieces. Time in the film is used deceptively- from one scene to the next, everyone seems to age years. From his small beginnings, Caden’s life and the film itself evolves (or devolves) into a grand landscape of non-sequiter.
To summarize the events of the film is, a this juncture, impossible- Kaufman distills time and pours as many different concepts and tricks into each scene as possible. You could not possibly catch all that there is to see just from one viewing, but by the slow fade to white at the end, it becomes obvious that, while not handing it to the audience, the film is ripe with intellectual concerns: the nature of inevitable death, existential angst, and the severe pain of love, coupled with the impossibility of making, as Caden strives to do, “a work of brutal truth and honesty”. In it’s own self-fulfilling way, however, Kaufman’s film achieves what few movies ever do: a true emphatic impression upon its audience, who are confronted not through violence of the harshness that all human beings experience.
