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 In cinemas now [M]
Director: Charlie Kaufman
Runtime: 124 minutes
Critics are hailing Charlie Kaufman’s magnum opus Synecdoche, New York as the movie of the year, but I’m calling bullshit on the whole sorry enterprise. The film flopped upon release in America, and deservedly so – it’s rambling, pretentious, hugely self-indulgent, and, lacking the visual flare of a collaborator like Michel Gondry, frequently ugly to look at. It’s astonishing that a movie with so much promise, and such an incredible cast – Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Dianne Wiest – could fall so flat on its face, but there you go.
Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a neurotic playwright in the throes of a midlife crisis, plagued by artistic angst as well as a particularly horrifying skin condition. His wife Adele, the always-excellent Keener, walks out early in the piece, and it’s hard to blame her – his seething jealousy of her success as an artist is eased only when he receives an open-ended grant to put on a theatre piece, any kind he wants. Caden spends the rest of the film disappearing into a rabbit-hole of his own creation, building a miniature New York inside a warehouse as he casts actors to play people from his real life, then other actors to play the actors, and so on.
Synechdoche, New York has a lot in common with Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry – both concerned self-absorbed New York writers whose obsession with turning life into art came around to bite them in the end. Both featured beautiful women throwing themselves at the protagonist for no reason. The key difference is that Allen’s was funny, tightly-written and enlightening, whereas Kaufman’s is a mess. There are some neat touches – Samantha Morton’s character, mousey and insecure, lives in a house that is constantly on fire – but it’s really not enough to justify the endless speeches about the nature of art, or the puzzling, infuriating leaps of logic that make up the final third.
The elements for an interesting movie are all there, yet Synecdoche fails to add up to much. Kaufman’s previous films – Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind among them – have been playful, sparky and smart, but in each case, he was working with an outside director, someone to temper the worst of his script-writing excesses and turn his literate angst into cinematic poetry. This time around, Kaufman himself is in the director’s chair, and that may be the ultimate problem – one gets the impression that, throughout the film-making process, nobody was around to say ‘no’ to him at any point. Kaufman’s so interested in exploring the life of a writer, it seems, that he’s forgotten how to bloody well write.
**
ALASDAIR DUNCAN
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