Synecdoche: figure of speech in which a part of something stands for the whole or the whole for a part. If this is a term you've never heard? Don't worry, it's a word that's buried so deeply in the labyrinth of your old SAT prep book that Indiana Jones would have trouble finding it. For writer/director Charlie Kaufman, however, synecdoche not only represents half of the title of his new film, Synecdoche, New York, but also characterizes the film as a whole.
Much like the above statement, Synecdoche, isn't particularly clear in its execution, but if you really force yourself to ponder it, some sense can be made out of it. That's the main issue with the film: The themes may be very quite clear to the filmmaker, but for the rest of us, it really takes mental fortitude to get to the same page as Kaufman.
The story starts out fairly straightforward. Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a fairly successful playwright from Schenectady, N.Y., and his marriage and health are failing. After the successful debut of his latest production, Caden receives a Genius Grant and is assigned the task of writing the next great play. Right about here is where most casual moviegoers start to get confused. As his personal life goes through its (many) peaks and valleys, Caden turns his production with an unlimited budget into a mirroring of his own life, going so far as to reconstruct New York City inside a warehouse. Absurdity after absurdity befalls poor Caden, and after each one he tries to incorporate it into his play. The story unravels like this until the bitter end, at which point Caden can no longer conduct his own day-to-day business, and therefore hires a "director" who tells him what to do as he goes about his life, up until his death.
Although that summary may make some sense, the movie is much less explicit in explaining itself. At some points, scenes are jumbled together in a manner that makes them seem ancillary and incoherent; and the tragedies that befall Caden happen in such an overt manner that it is hard to sympathize with him. Directly after the film ended, this was the experience that I encountered, but I forced myself to try to piece it all together (Kaufman wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich, after all). After nearly an hour of contemplation, the narrative starts to make sense, and the themes of man's worst fears manifest,and the idea of art being a true form of synecdoche begins to emerge.
This is certainly not a problem with the film per se, but something more like a condition. This film isn't for everyone. If you see this movie because you liked Sunshine, you're probably going to be disappointed. Kaufman had full control over this one, and that means that he was allowed to make the film that he wanted to make, a film that only he can understand. The themes are there, but it seems that it requires a decent amount of time with your thinking cap on to make sense of it. For film students, or people who really enjoy high art films, there's entertainment to be found in Synecdoche, but as far as the general moviegoer, it's a bit too over everyone's heads for it to be a good weekend distraction. In light of that commentary, take this grade with a grain of salt: B+.
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