Synecdoche, New York (2008) User Reviews

A thought-provoking, challenging Kaufman experience.

[commandercool88 · 8/10 · 20 December 2008]

syn⋅ec⋅do⋅che: a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part, the special for the general or the general for the special 'Synecdoche, New York' marks Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut. A monumental event on its own right. It is a maddening venture, a staggering project to face life's greatest of mysteries. Kaufman takes us on a soul-searching journey, one that he is taking every bit as much as we. It is a trip unlike any I have ever seen, and to say that I enjoyed it would be a very difficult thing to say. But 'Synecdoche' seems to be pointing towards something very profound, as undecipherable as it may appear. A flawed masterpiece, and a risk Kaufman seems willing to take.

There's nothing easy about 'Synecdoche', it is one of the most difficult films I've sat through. It's the sprawling story of one man's life, a tragic life. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives a harrowing performance as his character attempts to create a play of realism and honesty. And even as he dives head first into his work, his own life is in a perpetual state of free fall. A wife who leaves him, a daughter out of his life, relationships that crash and burn. His play, inside a warehouse where he has reconstructed New York City for people to live our their ordinary lives, becomes a fruitless and maddening descent into unhappiness and destruction.

What is 'Synecdoche' about? Is it one man's search for meaning in the midst of meaninglessness? That in order to appreciate the preciousness of life, we must accept the inherent chaos. Existence is what we make of it, and it is the choices we make that shape and define who we are and the lives we lead. Every choice brings with it a million different consequences, some seen and others that go unnoticed.

Kaufman tells us we are one in a world of many. We each play a starring role in the story of our life. People we meet every day, those we know and love. Never will we truly know them, their thoughts, or why they do what they do. And maybe it's not up to us to decipher what we will never understand. We must look inward, not to others, to find peace and insight.

If life is a play, the world is our stage. We only have this one shot, no second chances. We try to control our projectories, cast roles that need to be filled. In the end, what does it matter? Will the world miss us when we're gone? Life is what you make of it. 'Synecdoche, New York' dares to search for meaning, reconcile paradoxes to which there are no answers. But that doesn't keep Kaufman from giving it his best, as tedious and heart-wrenching as it may sometimes be.

More reviews: rottentomatoes.com/vine/journal_view.php?journalid=219276&view=public

Great idea but the execution is very odd, confusing and tedious to watch

[mardalsfossen01 · 6/10 · 28 January 2020]

There's some happenings in the movie which are very abnormal and weird. The main idea is great but in total I felt confused too often, not because of intellectual difficulties in understanding but because it's presented in an odd way. I feel drained after watching, not greatly inspired. A big weird movie which shows the mostly depressing and confusing late life of a theater director.

Potential masterpiece takes a wrong turn into the be-wilderness

[benjaminbuss · 6/10 · 21 March 2021]

The account of a troubled play-write, who's professional and personal life is severely hampered by hypochondria and paranoia. PSH brilliantly portrays the main protagonist, who's new production takes on an autobiographical form which spirals out of proportion and cohesion. Director C.Kaufman creates a highly imaginative dream-like study of 'the big picture' of human emotions which undoubtedly contains elements of his own life reflected within the story.

As a piece of artistic cinema, this movie has genius credentials. The fine production values, magnificent score, sprinklings of bleak humour, and clever elusions to the meaning of existence are acted out superbly by a tremendous cast. As a piece of enjoyable viewing, this movie falters. For all the ethereal intrigue and suitable eccentricity, the plot ultimately unravels into a confusing muddle. You can't help but feel that this movie was a collaborator short of guiding director Kaufman's wild idea into a monumental triumph, rather than an absurd ego trip that lost its way. 6/10

One of the Most Deeply Affecting Movies I've Seen in a Long Time

[evanston_dad · 10/10 · 29 November 2008]

It's virtually impossible to summarize my feelings on "Synecdoche, New York." This astonishing brain teaser from the mind of Charlie Kaufman affected me deeply, probably more than any film I've yet seen this year. I can't say it's necessarily enjoyable, because it's full of uncomfortable, brave truths about what it means to be human, and it goes places most movies don't dare to. But watching it is a bracing experience, and it's encouraging to know that there are still filmmakers willing to use film as a means of challenging their audiences and picking at scabs that most people would prefer to remain solidly in place.

I can't begin to tell you what "Synecdoche, New York" means, and it wouldn't matter anyway, because I think it will mean different things to different people. A basic summary goes something like this: Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a morose, depressed theatre director who's convinced that fatal diseases are lurking around every blood vessel, and who decides to stage a monstrous, ambitious theatrical work that will leave him remembered after he dies. Soon, the work as he's staging it becomes confused with the life he's living, so that he finds himself directing a version of himself through a story that seems to be made up as it moves along.

If this sounds like an act of mental masturbation by a pretentious intellectual with too much time on his hands, rest assured: "Synecdoche, New York" is not one of THOSE films. I didn't become impatient with Kaufman or his characters, like I have with some of his previous projects. In fact, this film made me uneasy because of how much of it I DID relate to. The conclusions it draws are that we are all alone in this big universe, life doesn't necessarily have any meaning other than what one brings to it, and there is not a higher power who is going to make sure our passage through the world makes sense. It was a bit of a wake up call to hear these beliefs, beliefs that I happen to share, stated so boldly, for while I'm confident in what I believe, that confidence doesn't make the beliefs themselves any less scary.

But depressing and nihilistic as those beliefs might sound, the film is life affirming in its own way. It suggests that too many of us spend too much time trying to make sense of the world and not enough time living in it. We pull back in loneliness and fear when faced with things bigger than ourselves rather than turning to those who can actually help, namely the other human beings with whom we share our time on this planet.

"Synecdoche, New York" will not likely find a big audience, as most people will either not want to work at understanding it or won't like what it has to say. But if you're willing to go into it with an open mind, you might just find yourself amazed.

Grade: A+

Phenomenal

[loveseedgems · 10/10 · 5 December 2008]

To start, let's make it clear that this movie will not be for everyone; I don't think any form of authentic art is. There is no flaw in this truth or in the people who do or do not find themselves moved by the art in question- it just is.

I do believe there are people who more intuitively and naturally reflect inward, on death, on life- the meanings of all these things; it is a natural state for them. And I believe there are people as equally blessed and cursed to not think very deeply on these matters. I think this film will find a comfortable home in the hearts of the former. Now, of these "inner seekers"- I believe you have all variations of folks- those that seek deeply and find beauty, connection, and great joy. There are those seek deeply and find isolation, grief, and deep wells of sadness. There are those who find some semblance of balance between the two. I myself lean more towards connection, and subsequent joy because of that… I found this movie to be profoundly moving- on almost a primordial level- and I believe- in a hopeful way. Don't get me wrong, I cried many times during the movie and didn't want to leave the theater when the film was finished. I held back the wells of whatever it was that was welling up in me until I got to my car and then unloaded some body shaking tears. It wasn't sadness, though… it was… something else. I don't really know yet. One thing I do know is that all of Kaufman's films seem to affect me in this manner. After the initial viewing- I know distinctly how the movie has affected me emotionally- I can FEEL it. I am not capable of defining that feeling, or explaining why that feeling has erupted (it is clear to everyone that his plot and content are generally all over the board and it usually takes several viewings to pull any real intellectual analysis from them)- but I certainly am conscious of something new and fresh happening inside my emotional hard wiring. I find that a phenomenal feat in the face of a sea of art which relies on very standardized ways of pulling it's consumers in emotionally. Do you remember how you felt after Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? I remember walking out and feeling very hopeful about the nature of love- in a whole brand new way. Not in the contrived, standardized Sleepless in Seattle kind of way… not to judge that- but there is something amazing about an artist who can make you feel things you are not sure you've felt before. That, to me, is authentic art. This really isn't about valuing one thing more than another- just offering great respect to someone who has taken your mind and heart to places it hasn't been before. It is nice to visit those old comfortable haunts, but this… well, like all of Kaufman's films- will take you somewhere entirely new- if you are predisposed to that kind of wandering.

to call it a disappointment might almost be a compliment, but I dare you to see it

[Quinoa1984 · 9/10 · 8 November 2008]

Note: This works MUCH better on a repeat viewing, practically a masterpiece, and one of the perfectly sad comedies ever made... though the last ten minutes is a slog (perhaps intentionally, as it's near the end of the tunnel... but it's still unbearable).

Over the course of my teenage years I've seen Being John Malkovich through Eternal Sunshine (those two the M-word, masterpieces, with Adaptation and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind near-great, and Human Nature a fun minor work), and he's always given something to chew on for the brain. He's an incredible wit, maybe too incredible, like something that could combust with the amount of ideas and ruminations and skill at defining what's important to us as people and what we want out of art. Synecdoche, New York could be seen as his life-summation of what concerns him as a writer. And to call it art is simple, because it is: it is, alongside the something like Inland Empire, the most challenging work to come out of American cinema. To say that either one is flawed may come as something as a given, but for Kaufman it's somewhat more troubling.

This is a big film of ideas, crucial, life-affirming (or life-damning) thoughts about love and death and loss and forgiveness and, essentially, the process of trying to recreate and recreate and recreate this. But at the same time the intellect to engage full-tilt by Kaufman the writer, the director couldn't engage me as a viewer emotionally - at least at first. This changed on a second viewing - I'm reminded of Woody Allen's assertion on multiple viewings of 2001 that Kubrick was much ahead of him on what he was doing - but on a first impression I have to wonder, with everything going for Kaufman the satirist, the original, the sad dramatist, what the movie's audience really is. Like the play that is rehearsed for decades that Cotard never brings to his audience, what can one take away from Synecdoche, New York as far as connecting with the characters, or just Cotard?

Maybe it reveals something about me just talking about this; indeed this is probably the film of the season, if not just the year (Dark Knight fanatics take note), that you will want to talk about after it ends. As far as puzzling works of art go it's great for a good argument, especially if one is familiar with how Kaufman's work has been leading up to this point. It's not exactly that the film is ever so confusing that one will want to walk out - there is a logic, in a sense, to the life imitating art imitating life imitating art etc etc aspect that makes sense.

When Kaufman, as director, makes his film this time about as hopeful as Franz Kafka rewatching the Zapruder film on a loop, even the scenes and moments that *do* feel somewhat powerful emotionally (i.e. Hoffman seeing his daughter in a nudie-booth, or the final scene on the bed with Hoffman and Morton old and in bed with the house, once again, on fire) don't hit their mark - again, at least at first. It's almost as if seeing the film again it becomes deeper, more resonant; like any work of art at another point in one's life, it could change, and if one gives it the chance it does.

Certainly the cast makes it worthwhile to watch: Hoffman is what he is, brilliant at transforming physically as age goes by as Caden Cotard, and at delivering subtle moments of humor amid his health-decay; ditto in her own right to Morton, who ranges from bubbly and lustful to anrgy and dejected (Michelle Williams, too, shows this range); even a bit part by Dianne Wiest is appreciated. They all help to give life to what is a big, somber meditation on (quoting Douglas Adams) Life, the Universe, and Everything.

And yet, expressing my (initial) disappointment over the length (at 124 minutes it feels twice as long) or the music (did Kaufman order "kill-myself-piano-tunes-you'll-love off of ebay for this?) or the personal problem of connecting emotionally with some of the characters as they (intentionally) don't really grow, shouldn't, I hope, diminish recommending Synecdoche, New York for anyone who wants something to challenge them, provoke thought and discourse, to engage and disrupt brainwave patterns. Perhaps there should be some disappointment; like life, and the art pulled out of it with pliers, it's not always a pretty sight, especially near the end. But it is a unique journey I was glad to take, and I hope every few years or so to come back to it, and see if it changes me, or if I've changed, since seeing it last.

A challenging mess

[JohnDeSando · 21 November 2008]

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players . . ."

Synecdoche, New York, like the literary term in its title, might stand for all our lives as director Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) attempts a gigantic stage construction of to depict his tumultuous life. Hamlet 2 it is not—it's a serious attempt by cerebral and creative writer Charlie Kaufman to deal with the muses and mistakes of a life worth noticing, in this case where Caden has won a MacArthur.

Caden eventually creates a discursive and massive stage play peopled by ex lovers who help him try to gain meaning out of a sometimes bleak Brecht or Beckett landscape. Kaufman takes us into and out of time and place, characters and ideas, so that to survive the viewing, we must allow him to digress and symbolize to distraction. The recurring motif of a house on the brink of burning down signifies the nearness of insanity and even death.

The specter of Death overshadows all else and serves as a catalyst for the artist's grand opus. It also allows him to muse on the meaning of life and the challenges of art, the former leaning toward a pantheistic notion that we are all made up of the people we have loved. Shakespeare's notion of the world as stage is more appropriate here than ever.

Artistically Kaufman is more in David Lynch land than anywhere else; I'm comfortable with that although the producers should not wait for the profits to roll in anytime soon—it's a challenging mess.

Caden Cotard: "I know how to do it now. There are nearly thirteen million people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due."

highly ambitious

[SnoopyStyle · 6/10 · 27 February 2016]

Theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is physically falling apart. He is working on the play Death of a Salesman with his leading lady Claire Keen (Michelle Williams). His wife Adele Lack (Catherine Keener) goes on a trip with their daughter Olive. Box office girl Hazel (Samantha Morton) keeps flirting with him. He gets a grant and rents out a giant space. He starts building a play where the cast does everyday things. The world inside the giant space starts becoming more real than the real world. Caden and Claire become parents with a girl as reality and fiction become indistinguishable.

This is a highly ambitious movie coming from the outsider mind of Charlie Kaufman. The start is pretty slow especially with a depressed Philip Seymour Hoffman. The movie turns very loopy, imaginative and utterly original. This is a movie trying to be life itself. It loses some of its cohesiveness as it tries to be too much. At times, I'm both resigned to not being able to grab hold of the story and interested to see more loopy ideas. I give Kaufman full marks for being unrestrained in his vision but this may need a bit more to make it an accessible watch.

Kaufman's Most Ambitious Film

[SeraphZero · 10/10 · 18 October 2008]

I got to see a screening of this in Boston, and let me admit to the fact that I consider this film a masterpiece. It is a rare entry into the market: an ambitious film, a gamble that, sadly, makes me question how much success it could garner in the mainstream box-office.

Charlie Kaufman, however, is not a screenwriter/director who inherently aims his sights on the box-office or the mainstream (anybody who questions this has to question Being John Malkovich). Instead, his greatest strength is a boundless creativity and insight into the qualities of humanity, and Synecdoche, New York is no exception. Rather, it is the apex of Kaufman at his most insightful, his most ambitious, and (as his directorial debut) his most hauntingly beautiful.

The plot itself is a contradiction of simplicity and complexity: to say that it is about Philip Seymour Hoffman trying to put on a larger than life play is an accurate statement, yet it completely fails to capture what Synecdoche, New York tries to convey. It is not a conventional film, but instead it is ambitious: a mixture of conventional narrative and surrealist cinema, one where the beauty of the film does not solely lie upon the plot, but the way every minute quality of the film ties together to form the tapestry.

The actors all do their parts brilliantly. I am hard-pressed to find any performance that was weak or, for that matter, standard of the Hollywood formula. Hoffman is brilliant in a role that utilizes his physical and acting gifts, and he takes the character through the spectrum of its possibilities. All the other actors also performed brilliantly, although what struck me as wonderful about the acting choices are that the majority of the actors present are not "glamorized" for the screen. Rather, the blemishes, the age, and the imperfections that make them ordinary are ever present in the film, making Synecdoche, New York seem beautiful in a strange, "dirty" way. Much like a city, its majesty lies not in grungy street corners or clogged rain gutters, but in the whole image that is comprised of such small, necessary imperfections.

And that, ultimately, is why Synecdoche, New York is such an ambitious, beautiful film. It is not a perfectly crafted standard screenplay, nor a perfectly executed piece of cinema. At least, Kaufman's work is not perfect under the current criteria of modern cinema. Synecdoche, New York is a gamble; a mixture of images and music and dialogue and acting that follows Kaufman's heart and his meditations on several ideas: namely, those on life and death and the connections all around us. It is dark yet funny, evocative and haunting. It is perfect in being a work of art that tempts us to find explanation, yet ultimately needs none compared to the feelings they evoke in us.

Viewers who are looking to see the difference between "art" and "entertainment" need only see Synecdoche.

The Living Theater Of Charlie Kaufman

[mjstellman · 6/10 · 24 October 2008]

It was bound to happen. The brilliant writer of "Being John Malkovich", "Adaptation" and "Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind" made his directorial debut. Interesting, yes, without question, but self conscious to the point of distraction. Kaufman's mind with all its implications is a the center of this dream colored by illness and paranoia. Strange echoes of Julian Beck and Luis Bunuel made the experience rather gripping but I must confess I felt the need to run home and take a long shower after the film and read something funny, I selected Alan Bennet's "Uncommon Reader" It worked. I may even go again to see this Charlie Kaufman film with its unpronounceable title. I guess that even that is on purpose, so we all can refer to it as Charlie Kaufman's movie. Philip Seymour Hoffman is great, as usual. This time I also felt his body odor. Yuck! I remember Hoffman's dirty fingernails even when he was playing Truman Capote so I presume that is the actor's trait and not the character's, although, here, the filth that he exudes matches perfectly his story. Catherine Keener and Emily Watson are also superb but Samantha Morton, once again, got me completely. I will advise you to see it, at your own risk.

Jiminy Christmas, this thing sucks.

[MBunge · 3/10 · 26 August 2010]

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.

Brilliant and bizarre!

[toologize · 10/10 · 11 October 2008]

What a trip. You can't expect a conventional picture from Charlie Kaufman, but this was super weird! So weird that half the people left the theatre before the end, either confused or offended by what they saw. Poor Charlie witnessed the whole scene and I suspect it really got to him.

The film's very much Spike Jonze in style, but grander and more ambitious than Malkovich and Adaptation. The first hour is hilarious, next half an hour is still good and you're struggling not to lose threads, the last half an hour gets really messy and tends to drag a bit. It might be due to Charlie's inexperience as a director, or it might be intentional and a means to express one of the points of the film (futility and dragging of time), or the topics simply grew too difficult to deal with, but it seems to me that the last part could have been made a bit more compact for a stronger impression. Seven to ten minutes less would have helped, if that was possible.

Perhaps Jonze would have done a better job in terms of pacing and craftsmanship, but the content is still really strong. The film had been five years in the making and you can feel the issues that Kaufman wanted to address brimming over. Illness, death, transience, love, relationships, passion, devotion, art, theatre, identity, hope, so many topics dealt with in a painfully sincere way. You both laugh and get emotionally affected all the time along with being confused by the twists of the plot and the grotesqueness of the imagery. You get many 'this is so true' moments that you completely identify with and then you suddenly get struck by a completely surreal scene. The film certainly reinforced my impression of Kaufman as a bastard son of Woody Allen and Tom Stoppard.

The cast is wonderful. Philip Seymour Hoffman has to be singled out for his magnificent performance. I have never been much of a fan of his and I was somewhat bothered by the idea of him as a lead in the next Kaufman movie. I didn't think he had a presence for that, but did he prove me wrong! Appearing in virtually every scene, the man has carried this film on his shoulders. He has created a completely lovable and ludicrous character and conveyed Kaufman's ideas splendidly.

Catherine Keener is as fun and adorable as ever! As a fan, I was really overwhelmed by this experience. I saw it two nights in a row, and spent hours discussing it with friends. The film is a bit difficult to comprehend instantaneously and Kaufman himself insists it requires a second watching. It is an amazing picture, rarely thought-provoking, and I can't wait to see it for the third time.

The New Charlie Kaufman: More Ambition and Less Joy

[marissas75 · 6/10 · 14 December 2008]

"Synecdoche, New York" feels like the work of a man gripped by fear, grief, and a sense that time is running out. The most ambitious of Charlie Kaufman's movies by a long shot, it is also the bleakest. Though Kaufman's work has always had a streak of comic miserablism running through it, his earlier movies are so creative and original that you feel invigorated by watching them. They're consistently delightful, and in the case of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," even profound.

"Synecdoche, New York" certainly aspires to profundity, but it's lost the sense of delight. It follows its protagonist, theater director Caden Cotard, for about forty years of "one bad thing after another." The only good thing that happens to him--he wins a MacArthur Genius Grant--turns out to be a curse in disguise, as he feels he must prove himself worthy of the grant, and spends the rest of his life conceiving and rehearsing a massive theater piece that never opens. Rather than engaging with life, he becomes lost in the world that he has created, building an exact replica of New York City inside a New York warehouse. The last part of the movie is a blur of deaths and funerals both real and re-enacted.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, perhaps the best sad-sack actor working today, plays Caden. He gives a fearless performance, but he's maybe too passive in the role--not displaying enough of the mad-genius ambition that propels Caden to create such a huge work of art. Catherine Keener, who was so sparky and vibrant in "Being John Malkovich", plays Caden's first wife as a glum-faced shrew with awful hair.

Brightening things up a bit is Samantha Morton, giving a very charming performance as the guileless box-office girl Hazel. And in a brilliant bit of doubling, Emily Watson plays the actress who plays Hazel in the play-within-the-movie. Hope Davis, in a small role as Caden's therapist, seems to have wandered in from another, less dour Kaufman movie--she'd fit in with the mad scientists of "Eternal Sunshine."

For me, the scene that encapsulates "Synecdoche, New York" shows Caden working on his magnum opus late at night. He has hired thousands of actors and now needs to tell them what their roles are, so he writes short scenarios on pieces of paper and distributes them to his cast the next morning. As the camera pans over the slips of paper, which cover the floor of the warehouse as far as the eye can see, we note that every scenario is sad and depressing: "You were raped last night." "You just lost your job." Thousands of papers, and not a happy one in the bunch.

If the movie took a skeptical attitude toward Caden's belief that only unhappy situations can make for great art, I probably wouldn't have a problem with it. But because the movie, instead, reinforces the idea that depression = genius and genius = depression, my entire belief system rebels against it. People have called "Synecdoche, New York" a profound commentary on the life of artists--but if being an artist was always like that, who would ever choose to become one?

One could see parallels between Kaufman's life and his protagonist's: like Caden, Kaufman has won a coveted honor, and his first project after winning is deliberately big and ambitious. In my opinion, Kaufman richly deserved his Oscar for the "Eternal Sunshine" screenplay. But he won't deserve any more Oscars if he spends the rest of his life self-consciously trying to make Great Art, at the expense of the light and witty touch that is the reason we came to love him in the first place.

Director takes great concept, applies surrealism pro forma, achieves little.

[howardfelstead · 3/10 · 26 May 2009]

When I saw the trailer for Synecdoche New York I was interested, intrigued and excited. A few hours later, after seeing the film itself, I left the cinema not just disappointed after what seemed like several hours of slow-moving, uninspiring, uninteresting, boring viewing; I was actually annoyed. Annoyed at the money and time I had parted with to sit through such an ultimately pointless experience.

The concept behind this film is a grand and exciting one. Theatre director, Caden Cotard, attempts to recreate the world he lives in with a vast cast of actors in a hopeless struggle to make sense of the misfortunes in his life and analyse his own inadequacies. With such a great inspiration and a stellar cast you would think Kaufman would have to try very hard to go wrong, but somewhere along the way he does.

In Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich Kaufman showed a great skill for combining strange plots with creative casting and a quirky comic edge to create profound and moving films riddled with symbolism. It is because of these films that his brand of surrealism has become popular and very successful. Synecdoche New York should and could have featured alongside these works as triumphs of the avant-garde. It does not. Kaufman seemed to spend so much energy applying surrealist quirks to the plot that he neglected the fundamental aspects of his film. I never connected with the protagonist or cared enough about his tragically unhappy life to find his story interesting or moving.

Had this film lived up to its promising roots I would have spent my time longing for Caden to find some sort of happy conclusion to his struggle. I would have felt sympathy and sorrow when he finally dies. As it was I spent my time longing for any conclusion so I could leave. I felt pity and in the end I was relieved when he died.

This may have been forgivable had the message behind the film said something innovative and original. Instead the message behind this waste of time of a motion picture was not to waste your precious life analysing your misfortunes. I wasted two hours of my life watching a highly analytical film effectively telling me not to waste my time because analysis is fruitless! Frankly that message is pointless, hypocritical and uninspired. I may as well have painted "carpe diem" on a wall and watched it dry.

Moreover, having decided to pass on this unhelpful message, Kaufman's incessant tangents of unrelated surrealism were more distracting and confusing than quirky or interesting. Where there was symbolism to be found I was usually so uninterested that it only served to detract from the core meaning of the film.

Maybe I have missed the point or lacked the patience to fully appreciate this film. I have asked myself this several times since seeing it, especially since so many other reviewers seemed to enjoy and admire Kaufman's creation. But no matter how much I reconsider the film I always come to the same conclusion: I wish it had been better. I wish I still had my money. I wish I could get those two hours back.

My advice: do not watch Synecdoche New York. Certainly do not pay to watch it. And at all costs avoid trying to pronounce the word Synecdoche!

Simulation Of Simulacra

[laverdiere · 10/10 · 2 November 2008]

In a fit of pretentious grad-school psychobabble I once sarcastically meta-critiqued a fellows students sculpture as being a "simulation of a simulacra" Now looking back at it... I don't think I knew what I was talking about, or why having crafted a "simulation of a simulacra" would have been a bad thing?

After seeing synecdoche new york, I think I now have a tangible example for that expression... and this film is going down as one of my all time favorites! Kaufman & Hoffman are perfect doppelgangers! They certainly complement each other better than Jim Carry, Nicolas Cage or John Malcovich did. Kaufman has illustrated his self-reflexive neurosis in a dark comedic way that has more angst and gravitas than Woody Allen or Michel Gondry. The film was so existential and dark I swear I wanted to cry at the end but was too perplexed. He portrays his life as a play within a play and has created actors to play him self and others to play those playing himself, like a hall of mirrors. There are moments that become so interwoven that even Borges & Baudrillard would have a hard time keeping track of the characters. In certain respects the film reminded me of Shane Carruth's 2004 film Primer, in which the protagonist has multiplied himself into a stupor that he needed to write his own short term crib-notes to figure out what to do next. If you haven't yet seen it .. run don't walk.

visionary, personal, deeply affecting

[jimpyke · 10/10 · 19 December 2008]

One of the movies Synecdoche brought to mind for me was Bunuel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" in which two different actresses play the same character with no explanation of any sort offered within the narrative.

It's always refreshing to me to see events in movies occur without the writer/director/actors seeming to feel any need to "explain it" to the viewer. As with (m)any other filmmakers who are genuinely engaged with film as a unique art form, it seems quite clear to me at least that Kaufman requires the spectator to meet him on his own wavelength.

This is what a significant portion of artists in any medium do: they take the constraints, conventions, and materials of their chosen form very seriously and explore their own perceptions, ideas, and emotions plying the tools of their medium on their own personal terms.

At the opposite end of this artistic spectrum is the sort of pandering manipulation of a Spielberg or the painter Thomas Kincaid. Their works are only "personal" in the sense that what is most prominently on display in their work is their own desperate personal need to have their intended message "understood" (and even experienced) by all spectators in exactly the same way, so that "the artist" can in turn feel his own personal worth has been validated by public and critical responses - "Hah, I must be a great artist, because I succeeded in making you think and feel the exact thing I wanted you to!"

I'll grant that this "spectrum" is a very broad one, and I won't discount the work of anyone along it, but that doesn't mean I have to enjoy things I see as technically accomplished hackwork. I don't, and never will.

I'll take an artist who refuses to telegraph his "statement" to me any day. I prefer works that wash over me, entrance me, and lead me down paths to new or long-buried thoughts and feelings.

I feel GREAT after having seen Synecdoche this evening. I laughed, I cried, and I see the world just a little differently now. I feel like a group of people I have never met (Kaufman and the others involved in making this wonderful movie) shared something with me that was very important to them. I wish I could thank them, because I think it takes a great deal of courage to share with others things that are so personally important in such an honest, unapologetic way.

I think it also takes a lot of courage for investors to throw millions of dollars at such a personal vision. It gives me hope for humanity that such a thing is possible.

The Day the Earth Stood Still gave me a tiny little glimmer of this sort of hope last weekend. But that movie was like a vending machine bag of chips compared to the full-course-meal of Synecdoche New York.

hyperreality affects the mind, the spirit, and the body

[lee_eisenberg · 10/10 · 11 July 2017]

I wouldn't go so far as to call Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" one of the greatest movies of its decade, but its intellectual profundity makes it one of the most impressive pieces of work. This story of a theater director whose life is unraveling has so many layers that it's hard to describe. An obvious point is that the movie goes to great lengths to blur fiction and reality, as the protagonist's play begins to look more and more like real life.

An important point is that time progresses throughout the movie without the characters stating it, or background objects showing it. The protagonist is shown aging, as is his daughter, while he expands his model city. Interestingly, the warehouse is impossibly large, while his ex-wife's art gets smaller over the course of the movie.

Key to the movie is Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance. He plays Caden as a man at the end of his emotional rope, just like Willy Loman (whom Caden plays early on). It's too bad that Hoffman isn't with us anymore. I have no doubt that he would still be playing great roles were he alive today.

Plenty of outstanding support comes from the rest of the cast. Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Tom Noonan, Emily Watson, Hope Davis, Dianne Wiest, and the rest of them show themselves to be some of the finest performers of our era.

Basically, any film buff owes it to himself/herself to see this movie.

Watered down David F. Wallace

[tieman64 · 19 October 2009]

"Context is key. From that comes the understanding of everything." - Kenneth Noland

Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" can be loosely divided into three sections. In the first we're introduced to Caden Cotard, a theatre director who is busy preparing a production of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman". Cotard is obsessed with death, the perishability of flesh, diseases, old age and psychological disorders. The name Cotard is itself a reference to "Cotard's syndrome", a mental disorder in which the subject believes that he is already dead.

So Cotard is a gloomy depressive, part Woody Allen and part an amalgamation of every neurotic character Kaufman's ever written. Played by Philip Hoffman, Caden is a tired man rendered perpetually gloomy by his sheer hyper-sensitivity. As Sharon Lind states in "Overexcitability and The Gifted", people with emotional excitability, often artists, manic-depressives or philosophers, "are acutely aware of their own feelings and of how they are growing and changing, often carrying out inner dialogues and practising self-judgement." In other words, the truly creative mind is no more than a creature born or pushed towards an abnormal hyper-sensitivity. This deep "attunment" then becomes either a blessing or a curse, and is often either channelled into creative endeavours, or numbed via drugs, sex, technology, art, alcohol etc, all of which serve as a means of numbing stimulus.

The choice of having Caden stage a production of "Salesman" is significant. Miller's play was about a businessman obsessed with attaining greatness, despite the fact that he was wholly untalented. In "Synecdoche", however, we have Caden Cotard become a stand in for writer Charlie Kaufman, both artists trying to overcome their respective existential problems by attaining greatness through art. IE - they're both intimately aware of their own mortality (and inconsequentiality) and so seeking to achieve immortality (and fame) through "great art".

So the first section of "Synecdoche" is simply a gloomy rehash of everything directors like Antonioni, Bergman, Wenders and Allen have done before (turn to literature, and such meta-fictional, postmodern crises are even more common - see David Wallace, Chris Ware et al - but of course nobody reads anymore). Kaufman may think he's latched on to some profound human truth, but his paean to suffering will seem limp to anyone who has read a little Satre, Camus, Dostoyevsky or Heidegger. For a film which begins with the line "I think I'm dying" and ends with the whisper "Die", the picture says surprisingly little about life and death, Kaufman content to simply wallow in despair.

A compressed version of Wenders' "Parix, Texas", the second section of the film is no better. Caden separates from his wife, has a series of sexual affairs, and attempts to track down his missing daughter. We watch as he buries his pain is sex and vices, but Kaufman never really explores these escapes. Everything is handled with a quirky, very snide tone. Compare this to Solondz's "Storytelling" and "Happiness" or Tamara Jenkins' "The Savages", the later two being better films in which Philip Hoffman essentially plays the same character undergoing the same problems. But it's all outdated existentialism (ie bourgeois nihilism). The kind of white middle-class malaise that Sam Mendes churns out, without much regard for any wider real-life, socio-economic context (ie cause).

Luckily the third section of the film deals exclusively with context. This is where Kaufman's playful genius kicks in. Cotard receives a Macarthur Genius Grant and is given funding to create a "revolutionary theatre experience" which is brutal in its honesty. "I won't settle for anything less than the brutal truth!" he exclaims.

And so Caden begins his magnum opus, constructing a vast theatre experience inside a disused warehouse. His play's story is nothing less than a reconstruction of his entire life, and consists of thousands of actors, doppelgangers, huge sets and hundreds of subplots. Gradually the production mutates and overwhelms the source material. Scenes from the play and scenes from life become interchangeable. Actors are hired to play the actors who are hired to play the actors who are hired to play the actors. The play expands, gradually becoming an ever-expanding world, the narrative morphing into a more literate version of Lynch's "Inland Empire".

Really, what Caden is attempting to create here is a work of art in which every action, every choice, every character, is subject to an unbreakable chain of dramatised causes and effects. "There are nearly thirteen million people in the world," he says, "None of these people are an extra! They have to be given their due!" And so Caden wishes to map everything. He wishes to put every gesture, every human being, in proper context, a desire which is of course wholly impossible, as you'd need a work of art that stretched back to the beginning of time and extended far beyond your own death.

In contrast, Caden's wife is an artist who focuses on the minute. She is a painter whose paintings gradually become smaller and smaller, focusing on single, seemingly inconsequential details. Significantly, she is happy and successful. Ignorance is bliss, after all, and existential misery stems precisely from the super-awareness of one's place in the universe (ie context).

The film ends on a powerful note, Caden's "ego dying" such that he "let's go" directorial control of his own "stage-play" (ie to cease being the ordering force in his life and move on). But what the film does best is show how decision making is timeless. Consider one scene in which a character's decision to buy a house also includes her decision to marry a certain man and die in that same house. She is made wholly accountable for her actions, including those she could not possible foresee in the real world. Kauffman's point: context is truth, but truth is suffering.

7.9/10 – Though its existential musings are trite, the film's third section is genius. Worth two viewings.

Interesting, but it doesn't work

[zetes · 7/10 · 16 November 2008]

It's not like Charlie Kaufman has written just great scripts in the past, with Human Nature and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, but I had hoped that, when directing his own script for the first time, he would be able to make the definitive Kaufmanesque artwork. Alas, maybe he needs the structure of another director to rein in his mad ideas. Or perhaps, like Human Nature and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Synecdoche, New York is just a misstep. It's not terrible or anything (and neither are his two other lesser films that I've already mentioned twice), but it just doesn't work. The movie involves a play director (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who gets a genius grant. Always having put on the plays of others, he now decides to write his own play, about his own, miserable life. Not just one part of his life, but his whole life, from birth to death, encompassing every daily event. Soon the play is about a director putting on a play about a director putting on a play. The idea is fascinating. Unfortunately, the execution is poor. Like Adaptation, Synecdoche comes from Charlie Kaufman's inner insecurities. This one is completely internal, and doesn't take place in any recognizable reality. There are bald symbols at every corner, like a house that is perpetually in flames. Kaufman rarely gives any real clues about these symbols, which leads to them being analyzed and then just dismissed as self-indulgence. Kaufman never gave me an in with the picture, so I just never cared about what was going on. And much of the time, Kaufman's sense of humor is lacking. Some of the more jokey material, like the arrogant, self-promoting psychologist played by Hope Davis, gets dropped as the film progresses, right about the time it's becoming pretty funny. I did start to like the movie better when it was dealing with the multi-layered universe Hoffman had put himself in. That mind-bending stuff is quite entertaining.

Philip Seymour Hoffman. An Immortal Actor.

[namashi_1 · 10/10 · 18 June 2014]

Philip Seymour Hoffman. An actor par-excellence, who tragically passed away four months back at the age of 46, had a career of only ups, in my opinion. Be it a cameo, a supporting part, or even being a leading-man, Hoffman never failed to astonish us, with his sheer brilliance as an actor. And in 'Synecdoche, New York', Hoffman delivers a tour-de-force performance as a man in search of life. Hoffman dominates the show with a sterling act!

'Synecdoche, New York' Synopsis: A theatre director struggles with his work, and the women in his life, as he creates a life-size replica of New York City inside a warehouse as part of his new play.

'Synecdoche, New York', written & directed by the magnificent Charlie Kaufman, is tale of life. It has everything. Happiness. Sadness. Struggle. Love. Hate. Jealously. Loss. Death. The protagonist, Caden Cotard, played by Hoffman, experiences every emotion a human-being goes through. Its eventually a tragic story of a man's struggle of dealing with life, but the impact it leaves on its viewer, is tremendous.

Kaufman''s Screenplay is saddening, but moving & memorable, as well. Kaufman's Direction, on the other-hand, is simplistic. Cinematography is excellent. Editing is just right. Art Design is fabulous. Make-Up is perfect.

Besides Hoffman, its Samantha Morton, who stands out with a terrific performance. Her scenes with Hoffman, are simply brilliant.

On the whole, 'Synecdoche, New York' is an effort that cannot be missed! And for Hoffman, Rest In Peace. You Will Always Be Missed!

Worth the Time, Even if it is Exasperating and Uneven

[massadvj-11502 · 7/10 · 6 September 2021]

Early on in the movie Synechdoche, New York a play director creates a production of Death of a Salesman, and his hook is that Willie Loman should be played by a young man who THINKS he is old, and therefore it adds a new irony to his self-destruction in the end. What then follows in the movie is two hours of writer/director Charlie Kaufman exploring what it means to live, love, age and die -- all from a perspective that would make Willie Loman blush with ineptitude.

Kaufman is a young man who clearly thinks like an old man with many regrets. He lays himself bare here, and what we see is a man who is deeply insecure, paranoid in the extreme, with severe hypochondria, and an irrepressible death wish. To say that the protagonist of this film (played eerily by Philip Seymour Kaufman whose own internal demons would destroy him in similar fashion to the character he plays here) is not a guy who knew how to extract any fun out of living would be an understatement.

The film explores a lot of heavy themes: human sexuality and how it interferes with everything we do, infidelity and betrayal, the purpose of life, our inability to escape from playing roles in order to satisfy societal norms (along with the confusion it causes). It's very heady stuff. Most of all, the film is about suffering and dying. Kaufman does not hold back one bit in terms of showing us his fears in that regard, and he lays bare his conviction that there is no meaning in the end.

If this film sounds like a depressing bummer, you would be right. My advice is not to see it if you do not like such films. Also, do not see it if you hate films that have very little in the way of narrative, linearity, or even coherence. You will find none of that here. It is a jumbled mess of a movie that communicates directly through symbols and emotion, and plays like a dream (or nightmare).

I am sure there must be many interpretations of this movie out there. Did he die from the plumbing mishap in the first third of the movie and then the rest of it is his death dream? I think you could interpret it that way. But it really doesn't matter. This is a movie that must be processed emotionally. The left brain needs to be parked in the corner when you watch it. Nothing will make sense.

I found this movie haunting, but uneven. It is worth the voyage mostly because Kaufman's work is always worth the voyage, in the same way that listening to a song by Bob Dylan is always worth the voyage. Every one of the works may not be up to the standards of the masterpieces, but they all have something that reveals the brilliant mind of a unique artist.

That is true of this movie, even if Kaufman's mind is a place only the insane might wish to inhabit.

One weird and incredibly depressive ride; but a failed one

[Ricardo-36 · 5/10 · 26 October 2009]

Well, first, I've got to say, for his first job as director, Charlie Kaufman handled it pretty well, although I'd say he still lacks the ability to know when the pacing is not working. He got some pretty good performances on this film, and handled the whole technical aspects of film pretty well.

Sadly, the job should've gone to Spike Jonze, as he would be able to filter out the madness and stick to what a film is supposed to be.

Charlie Kaufman seems to be stuck into filming "meta-fiction", into adding little bits of witty, nonsensical humorous dialog, surrealism and recursive references (this guy playing this guy who plays this guy, or this guy inside this guy). So this time it's a play inside of a play, going on almost on real time with no purpose. Oh I get it. Clever.

But Charlie Kaufman gets lost in it. He leaves the whole "Adaptation"/"Eternal Sunshine" reality to go to David Lynch territory here. Now don't get me wrong, I love "Eraserhead" and I'm fine with him going a bit surreal or non sensical, but he just throws the absurd on screen for no purpose. He messes with time, with reality, with the main character's disabilities, for no purpose, only to have it there. What was the point of Philip Seymour Hofman not controlling his tears or the way he takes soup? It was there for the kick of it. Because it is "weird". There was no clear connection to the whole point, and people are not going to be able to read Mr. Kaufman's mind, and we are not stupid if we cannot "see it". The whole film is a justification for the plot and ideas he wants to represent, not the contrary. He forces the whole surreal state into the audience and begs us to buy it, or to try to understand it. It doesn't work that way! Lynch knows it. Kaufman doesn't. Kaufman seems to throw his audience into confusion on purpose. A film should not require two or three viewings to "get it", no matter who wrote it or what his purpose was - unless he wanted us to buy more tickets. Or the DVD.

But, all in all, the whole idea of what Kaufman meant to do was neat in a way, and buried in a gigantic mess of a film there are a few good messages, good scenes, a solid acting, and some 2 hours of entertainment. I wouldn't say I lost 2 hours of my life seeing this, because it pretty much served its purpose as a film, even though it was sad and depressing as hell - kudos on the whole "pathos" thing. But he could do better. I hope he does, when his next movie comes out, maybe 10 years from now, considering how fast he works, or how much work he is in need now to pay his bills.

Meet my friend, Paranoia

[giannispalavos · 9/10 · 20 September 2008]

"Synecdoche, New York" expands on the basic subject themes of all Kaufman's work, but mostly on "Adaptation". And it makes "Adaptation" look like an exercise for kids compared to this.

It's one of the best hypochondriac's film, one of the best films on struggling with paranoia and, in the end, being defeated. It brought in my mind some of Ingmar Bergman's characters and, of course, Woody Allen's, but without the liberating sense of humor. Liberating for the characters, that is. Here there is no salvation for the protagonist- just like in Bergman's case.

The film flirts with being a bit pretentious, although it surely pokes fun at nearly all the intellectual blah-blah and clichés one sees all around the art world. So, I guess it rather saves itself that accusation. If it only was 15 minutes shorter, then I wouldn't know what to nag about.

It seems that Charlie Kaufman was not afraid to challenge his hip followers, did a difficult to appreciate movie, dark, that really makes your stomach and your brain hurt with with over-activity.

It's a great film.

no conventional score applies to Synecdoche, New York

[Fresh-DopeBoy · 7/10 · 17 November 2008]

It is very difficult to conceive of a movie much more complex than synecdoche. Yet, oddly, I have no desire to see it again just so that I might resolve something. Not because I disliked it, but because so many scenes were indelibly imprinted within my mind such that I "get it". That is, I "get it" as much as can be expected. My first impression as the movie started was that "dialogue" was the entertainment. Actually, for this reason (i.e., dialogue), I would see this movie again. However, because the dialogue heightened my awareness of the same, it became easily perceptible when dialogue began to yield its place to various "prop devices" as the centerpiece of entertainment. I'm not necessarily using the phrase "prop devices" as disapproval because we sometimes present ourselves as silly when we, for example, indicate that such and such should not exist or should be replaced by such and such. In many cases, we would have then simply created "another movie". In this case, maybe we should make our own movie. That's when some of us would realize just how difficult it is to actually make one of these things. Some of the devices (literary or cinematographic) used by Kaufman were stunning or spectacular! For example, the "voice" of Adele's (Cotard's wife played by Catherine Keener) miniature paintings, and the paintings themselves, were used to great effect. The creation of a "New York within New York" presents very interesting and creative cinematography. The work (make-up, costume, and lighting) performed to create the illusion of aging characters is also very well done. And while the seemingly non-stop, nested twists and turns might make one dizzy, it is just this unexpected variety that provided a journey instead of just another movie. Philip Seymour Hoffman continues to deliver. I found his performance to be communicative and almost accessible to the touch, as one is almost unaware that he is acting. This gives us the feeling that we know him. We then become comfortable with him, and finally empathetic.

This movie comes at you in layers of interwoven humanness. Every message invited the audience to think about themselves, their families, their lives, their legacy, their meaning, and their relationships. Caden Cotard (main character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) was chronically, and strangely ill. There was a scene where Cotard, after receiving permission from his wife Adele, urinated in a sink while his wife and young daughter were both present in the room (present, but not watching). His urine appeared to be mostly blood yet he offered no reaction at all and simply carried on as if the absurd had become the expected. His sickness seemed to symbolize the loneliness that is concomitant with the very individuality necessary in order to qualify as an autonomous human being. If we die alone, are we in fact alone? Of course, this movie is about much more than that. No doubt, most of the criticism of this movie will be that it is far too ambitious. But what do we want? Do we want movies that only fit within our conventional range of pace, dialogue, boundaries, and cinematography? It seems that conventional movies will continue to appear with great frequency so, they will be readily available, but movies like Synecdoche are rare. Nevertheless, there were quite a few things that I did not like. While Phillip Seymour Hoffman very convincingly depicted the kind of leg tremors that might be caused by neuropathy, I found his enactment of a seizure to be so unconvincing that I actually laughed aloud. Interestingly enough, there was a gentleman one row up and about 10 seats to my right, who clearly did not like my idea of "funny". – Although one got the strong impression that the gentleman expected everyone within 200 feet of him to "synchronize" with his idea of good comedic timing, as he outscored us all with his use of laughter aloud -- And that is one of the effects of the complexity of this film; that is, though this film might be easily regarded as "despairing", there were many funny moments where laughter erupted even while surrounded by loss and brokenness; just like real life. Sometimes, though, brilliance might not be brilliance; sometimes it just might be simple depravity disguised as something intellectual and modern. For example, while I love Tom Noonan's work in most everything he does, I did not like Kaufman's wording of his character's pitch to play Cotard. – Obviously, this "play" is not a real play, but a montage of a construct that represents the mind, fears, and philosophies of Cotard. While I would prefer dialogue that allows for the existence of things like intellectualism, the intelligentsia, modernity, and the avant-garde without requirement for homosexual references, don't mistake my preference for a suggestion that anything should be changed in this movie. Since Cotard was not homosexual, parts of the movie seem to suggest it par for the course that all men somehow contend with homosexuality. This is not true. This is the movie that Charlie Kaufman wanted to make. No one can say that it should be anything other than what it is. I doubt that any of us will agree on much regarding this movie, as we don't agree on much regarding life.

clever but unsatisfying

[cherold · 5/10 · 1 December 2009]

It's hard to know what to say about this one. It starts out as just a bleak movie about a depressed guy with mysterious ailments, and for a good chunk of the movie it looks like that's all there's going to be. Then odd surrealistic elements start popping up and time comes loose from its moorings. And eventually the central concept of the ultimate play is introduced.

All this weird stuff is kind of interesting, and kind of intriguing, and there are some really clever ideas mixed into it all, yet the movie seems aimless and far too depressing. Not that depressing is bad, but in a way it doesn't mesh with the surrealism.

I think Kaufmann just had too many ideas he wanted to stick in. The central play is a really great idea that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, but I feel it would have worked a lot better if that had been the entire focus; in other words, make a fairly straightforward movie with a weird but almost plausible mechanism rather than pile weirdness on top of weirdness. Kaufmann's goal seems to have been to out-weird his previous screenplays, and he certainly succeeds there, but it just loses focus. And you can argue that a self-indulgent, unfocused movie is perfect when it's about a self-indulgent, unfocused play, but ultimately it seems like Kaufmann is just saying, I'm messed up, the world is messed up, and I'm just going to toss the whole mess at you and let you manage it as best you can.

Sure, it's art. But Kaufmann has in the past been great at combining art with entertainment, and here the entertainment has been tossed out in favor of a statement that is never clear. And by making a less entertaining film, Kaufmann has managed to simply highlight where he fails as an artist.