Early on in Charlie Kaufman's
Synecdoche, NY a woman named Hazel drives up to a burning house. She rings the doorbell, quickly drawing her hand away because of the heat. She speaks with a real estate agent about the prospect of buying the house and the conversation is mundane. They talk about how good a price the house is being offered for, how well the size fits someone who lives alone and the unfinished but accommodating basement. We begin to suspect that the fire is purely a metaphor, simply an interesting symbol to enhance what the house and its purchase means to Hazel. Then:
Hazel: I like it. I do! I'm - I'm just really concerned about dying in the fire.
Burning House Realtor: It's a big decision - how one prefers to die.
So the house IS perpetually on fire, it's just that nobody seems to mind. It isn't that the characters ignore it so much that they do not feel that it is worth mentioning.
Synecdoche, NY succeeds at, if nothing else, building a convincing dream landscape. Or maybe it's a meta-dream landcape. Or purgatory. Or an enhanced reality from the point of view of the psychotic. Or maybe just the sycotic. The plot (as much as it can be called a plot) focuses on a sickly theatre director (played perfectly by Philip Seymour Hoffman) who receives a MacArthur grant some time after his wife leaves him. Taking his wife's advice that there is nothing artistically exciting about putting on someone else's work (the grant has been earned, presumably, by his production of Miller's
Death of a Salesman with young people playing Willy and Linda. We take it on the director's good word that the play received rave reviews but every character who comments on it is unimpressed) he tells his therapist that he wants to create a large scale, all-encompassing and "
brutally honest"
autobiographical production. He buys an impossibly large theatre space in Manhattan and hires a cast of well over 50. The production continues to grow and soon he not only has actors playing people in his life, but actors playing those actors. He casts a man with no theatre experience whatsoever as himself because the man claims to have been stalking him for 20 years. He is soon instructing his set team to literally construct fourth walls and before long the rehearsal space is a scale replica of Manhattan. At one point an actor asks when they are going to get an audience, "
we've been rehearsing for 17 years!"
In the meantime his own life takes on strange twists as he pursues various relationships with different actresses (most of them playing the same role, that of Hazel the box-office girl), attempts to track down his daughter who has become both the muse and canvas of a renowned German tattoo artist and obsessively cleans his wife's apartment after he is mistaken by a blind old landlord for the cleaning lady. That he later hires someone to play the cleaning lady (the scenes we see this character in during rehearsal are his actions, not the perpetually off screen real woman) reveals the bizarre depths of his mind's...uh...something.
The man's name is Caden Cotard. Some quick research tells me that the Cotard delusion involves the mistaken belief that oneself is literally or figuratively dead. Indeed Caden is extremely preoccupied by death and holds a strong belief that he is dying over the course of the 40 or so years the film takes place over. He has a vague disease that is slowly destroying his autonomic functions, but seems to be treatable: in one scene he chases after a woman who knows his daughter's whereabouts and finds the present he sent her in a dumpster. He takes the time to apply tear replacement eyedrops before crying over it.
Roger Ebert has claimed that this is his favorite film of the last decade. Personally I cannot say whether this is a good film (although I am quite sure it is not a bad one). I can say however that there are moments of artistic brilliance. I can say that every performance is brilliant. I can say that I watched this film with intense fascination and can say that I have not stopped replaying the final scenes in my head, trying desperately to figure out why they made such an impression on me. I can say that it one of the most fascinatingly baffling films I have ever seen and one of the most bafflingly fascinating. I can say that it is undoubtedly worth seeing.
EDIT: I saw it again today and can now say with some more conviction that it is good, or at the very least that the last 15 minutes are incredible.
____________________________
Director of the Department of Orderly Disruptions
[Last edited by Snacko at 07-24-2011 11:43 PM]