Synecdoche, New York
First screened and reviewed in November 2008 / Most recently screened and reviewed in November 2024
Director: Charlie Kaufman. Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Tom Noonan, Dianne Wiest, Emily Watson, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Deirdre O'Connell, Alice Drummond, Sadie Goldstein, Lynn Cohen, Jerry Adler, Robin Weigert, Amy Wright, Paul Sparks, Elizabeth Marvel, Robert Seay, Peter Friedman, Josh Pais, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Frank Wood, Rosemary Murphy, Tim Guinee, Christopher Evan Welch. Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman.

 I wrote this on my phone on two commuter train rides this Tuesday. Like anything written on my phone and/or on the train, it needed copy-editing. The events of the day meant I never did that and thus never posted. It's now the last relic of my thinking and writing from one part of my life, and the first artifact of the next.

   
Photo © 2008 Sony Pictures Classics /
Sidney Kimmel Entertainment
In the wee hours of this morning, with an obscure moon lighting an obscure world, I started rewatching Synecdoche, New York. The main reason is that Tim Robey's wonderful book Box Office Poison: Hollywood's Story in a Century of Flops debuts in print in the US today (UK on Thursday!), and one especially sad, hilarious, illuminating chapter is simultaneously in praise of, in awe of, and kinda in memoriam to Synecdoche. I really want people to read this book, and I really want people to rewatch this movie, so I decided to be the change I want to see.

(same person, slightly different wig)
In the wee hours of this morning, though not so wee by the time I finished, I rewatched Synecdoche, New York—my first full viewing since being blown sideways by it in the theater in 2008, six days after US voters elected Barack Obama. The main reason is that my Honors advisee in English is writing a senior thesis about Charlie Kaufman, with Synecdoche, New York as one of its privileged case studies, and it was high time I check back in. He's especially interested in puppetry as an occasionally literal practice but also a richly pliable concept in Kaufman's films… and, I would add, in election years.

(same person, slouchier, slightly grayer hair)
In the wee hours of this morning, 40 minutes into Synecdoche, New York, I walked a half-block from my apartment to my polling station to help elect Kamala Harris, Danny Davis (no relation), Monica Gordon, Precious Brady-Davis (no relation), Mariyana Spyropoulos, Felix Ponce, and my three favorite candidates for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation Board. I also cast positive, negative, and neutral votes on dozens of circuit court and appellate court judges, having researched all their records and biographies—an important and informative task but also a surreal roundelay of bizarre human stories. The candidate who lost three times under his given name, and then changed his party affiliation and adopted a new, ethnically different name to try to win this year. (Update: he appears to have lost again.) The two judges who have demonstrably lied about living in Cook County despite the requirement that Cook County judges live in Cook County. The judge who joined a semi-secret investment group called Table of Wisdom with a later-disgraced alderman but insists it was nothing below board. The judge who regularly agrees to fill in for colleagues who need to be absent for a day and then, while they're gone, rewrites the sentences or throws out the plea deals on which those colleagues have spent days or weeks. This gallery of weird, accomplished, pitiable people (I'm leaving out the hypercompetent, principled, straightforwardly inspiring ones, who are the majority) reminded me of the people in Synecdoche, New York, which is anchored by its sad, hilarious, illuminating character study of Philip Seymour Hoffman's tortured playwright and despondent loner Caden Cotard but, down ballot, teems with oddballs just as brilliantly written and played, albeit with less screen time.

(same person, stress-induced hairline erosion)
This morning I rewatched Synecdoche, New York because it might be the most colossally sad character drama that Hollywood has produced this century, and I'm fearful this could turn into a colossally sad day. A big part of Caden’s problem is that his own misery and severe self-judgment have grown to such outsized proportions that he increasingly experiences the world as a theater of his own life, which he technically leads and directs but over which he nonetheless exerts little comprehension or meaningful control. Indications accumulate that the world outside Caden’s solipsistic circumference may be descending into poverty or desperation or violence: dead bodies lining the asphalt, audible gunfire, naked strangers on the sidewalk. But we cannot tell what's really happening because Caden is only thinking about the ostensibly unsolvable riddle of himself. The inflation of his own regrets and traumas reaches all-absorptive, moon-sized scale. It has just enough of a gravitational field to keep pulling into itself more scenes, more people, more feelings, more stuff.

The movie pities Caden for all this and even sympathizes, marveling at the one-of-a-kind megalopolis dramaticus he semi-wittingly produces without exonerating him from charges of grandiose selfishness and arguably misplaced priority. And I'm wrestling with my sense of how many voting members of the American polity are not sufficiently looking outside their own maximalist preoccupation with self (even when their problems are authentic, even when I agree with some of them, even when some suffer intensely while refusing to see others’ suffering) to make the only choice I can possibly see as serving a greater good. A lot of the voting public today is going to the polls, with open eyes, to put down a bid on the house that's already on fire, while presumably assuring themselves they can live with the blaze and the smoke, and surely theirs won't be the bodies in the streets.

(same person, making an effort)
This morning I rewatched Synecdoche, New York, and setting aside there were reasons I had to, I'm so, so glad I chose to, because as tragic as the movie is, it is also heroically inventive, bravely balls-to-the-wall, and exquisitely executed according to its one-of-a-kind blueprint. I wanted to be inspired by great art on a rainy Election Day morning that could easily go south but might also culminate in joyous victory. The candidate at the top of the ticket just might, after only 107 days and in a generally hellish time for the world, pull off a giant go-big-or-go-home swing at a victory that should have been impossible, not unlike the creative miracle that is the pricy, convoluted, schematically and emotionally alienating, higher-than-high-concept Synecdoche, New York. A movie where even the woman knowingly buying the flame-licked house is treated with warmth and compassion. A movie where actors present foolish or cruel or unappetizing sides of their characters (Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis, all superb), but still elicit some sympathy, some recognition. A movie where a woman, played by the forever magnificent Dianne Wiest, swoops in to take over the directing reins of the whole monumental project once the man who initially led it and hired her as background accomplice has demonstrated his incapacity to finish it.

This movie has the integrity and temerity to look squarely at sadness—devastation, even, whether social or interpersonal or psychological—without making it easier. The last sentence of the script is a single-word imperative: “Die.” But the movie mines a huge amount of weird, disarming humor and of harrowing, humbling clarity and of honest, warts-and-worse self-assessment from this unflinching look at human sadness. Remember how “Charlie Kaufman” asked in Charlie Kaufman’s script for Adaptation, “Why can't there just be a movie about flowers?” Kaufman asks in Synecdoche, New York, why can't there just be a movie about sadness—real, day-to-day, fist-clenching, bowel-releasing, inconsolable sadness? And he commits to it, even as the movie is also so many more things than “just” that—many, many more things than most movies manage or even aspire to be.

(same person, thicker lenses, whiter hair, limping) If Harris loses, as she might, America’s Story in One Century-Shaping Flop, I may require further recourse to this user's manual on inconsolable sadness and how to live with it, or how not to. I mean approaches best avoided; this is not a goodbye note. If I discover I'm more surprised by that loss than I expected to be, I may need to ask myself—and many people I know, love, or respect and whose values I share may need to ask themselves—have we actually been taking stock of the world as it is in recent weeks, months, or years? Or have we been building, staring at, acting in, and getting slightly lost inside a giant, world-sized model of the world that we've forgotten is not the world but a projection of ourselves (even the bad parts) and our desires, and that there's lots else we've conveniently left out?

(same person, somehow more who he was before) If Harris wins, as well she might, I imagine I will feel as the curtain descends on her campaign how I still feel at the end of Synecdoche, New York. What I just watched was really confusing, I will say. What I just experienced was really hard, I will say, and it seems like it went on forever even as it also feels, somehow, like it flashed by in a second. It was full of redirects, parentheses, fragments, run-ons, sudden leaps and breaks, people changing but not really changing. I can't believe the weird gaggle of people who showed up along the way: there was Tom Noonan, there was Emily Watson, there was Stephen Adly Guirgis, there was Liz Cheney, there was Charlamagne tha God, there were all those hundreds of swing voters I wrote letters to but will never meet, there were all those lovable weirdos that I, a hopefully lovable weirdo, canvassed with in Wisconsin. I can't believe anybody tried this, and stayed committed even when it was all going so wrong. I can even less believe they (we?) pulled it off. It's so especially gratifying because it was so difficult, the path bestrewn with obstacles but not, at least, with bodies. It's so beautiful. I've been so bewildered and often so sad this whole time and now I'm so, so happy. Grade: A

(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd.)


 Two days later: Oof.
Democracy Dies in Darkness.
Die.
Awards:
Independent Spirit Awards: Best First Feature; Robert Altman Award (Best Ensemble Cast)
Los Angeles Film Critics Circle: Best Production Design (Mark Friedberg)
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