The Synecdoche Syndrome
It took Roger Ebert declaring it the best movie of the 2000s, but I have finally seen Charlie Kaufmann’s Synecdoche, New York. Have you heard of it? It made around $4 million domestically, which doesn’t quite recoup its $20 million budget, or even properly pay for the massive set-within-a-set that creates the movies meta-textual centerpiece.
While Ebert and other critics are certainly big fans, that gross suggests it didn’t connect elsewhere. My beloved film critic sage Owen Gleiberman led the brigade of Synecdoche haters on its release, giving the movie a D+, stating, essentially, he wanted to give up on the movie and declare the whole thing “the structure of psychosis.”
More than that, though, Gleiberman – an extraordinary writer always beholden to his viewpoint – seemingly reacted this strongly based on what he perceived others’ responses to be, and accurately predicted (not that anyone would really do otherwise) that a cadre of “eggheads” would declare the movie a masterpiece. Certainly Ebert believes so. Humble as ever, Ebert stated that he saw the movie a first time, “believed it to be a great movie, and that I had not mastered it.” Interesting viewpoint.
Ebert’s sense of the movie has more of a grasp of contemporary standards over all. When is a movie allowed to be a confusing masterpiece, rather than just confusing? We all know 2001 was released to baffles in 1969, but enough people were able to get behind that to make it now considered a classic. What about the career of Ingmar Bergmann, who essentially popularized the pretentious, challenging film? Reading Ebert’s comments, I was reminded that so many of these artists of difficult, important movies were not always considered to be such forward-thinking geniuses – those movies too had to be released and reacted to. Likely that initial reaction was bafflement.
My reaction to Synecdoche is sort of bafflement, but sort of that it wasn’t quite worth the bother. As a declared “love it or hate it” movie, it gives an ample amount of ammunition to each side. There are scenes that are cracklingly fun in Synecdoche, and touches of absurdity that make you appreciate the ability of a movie to travel in its own weirdness. There’s the house Samantha Morton’s Hazel lives in, which is always on fire, prompting Hazel to voice concern, like 20 years before her death (who can keep track of this timeline anyway), that she’s concerned about “dying in the fire.” Instead, the house feels cozy, and ridiculous. There are the hilarious scenes with Hope Davis as a rather terrible psychologist who attempts to sell her book Getting Better to her clients for $40 and writes in one unrelated bit of pep vagueness after another – a run in between her and protagonist Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) on a plane is memorably demented and puzzling. I also loved its time-keeps-on-rapidly-ticking-away pace that makes the years sweep by, which reminded me, in its way, of the David Chase-directed final episode of The Sopranos. Then too monumental events seemed to be going by, like life does, before we could even get a good grasp of them.
There are moments too, through the nuttiness, that something interesting and deeply true is hit upon. Caden asks Hazel, somewhere 10ish years past their failed romance, to look at him as she once did, with love and awe. It’s a theme of the movie that people are adept at ruining each other’s pristine images of one another. That idea is ripe for a movie, and actually, despite its logical jumping jacks, Synecdoche comes at that theme with admirable clarity.
But then, there are also scenes that seem rather obsessed with saying something, I don’t know what it is, about obsessing over a few characters’ sexuality. Or the stuff about Jungian psychology. There’s that play within the play and the set within the set and the play within the play within the play. I have to list some of these things out to make sure they were there at all. Plus I have to think no one would write a character named Millicent Weems without that name signifying… something. In describing the movie, Kaufmann said he wanted to move away from gimmicks like "mind portals and memory erasing" - describing, of course, his deeply-accessible-by-comparison scripts of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Well, I hate to point out to him that his "gimmicks" are what work best for him - the burning house is a gimmick, so is Davis's wacky psychology book. In effect, his "play," given more attention, might be a great gimmick in itself.
Watching Synecdoche and trying to describe it with the same approach as other movies is rather tiring and unwise. Yet most movie reviews stick to just that, strangely. Says Emily Rems of Premiere: “At turns as neurotic and nebbishy as any Woody Allen flick, as creepy and disorienting as your favorite "Twilight Zone" episode, and as steeped in magical realism as the most moving Márquez novel, Synecdoche may not be the feel-good date movie of the year.” Ok then. Or Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, “As a director, Kaufman isn't yet his own best salesman. He's not enough of a visual stylist to sell his script's most challenging conceits. But the cast rises to a very strange and rich occasion.” Well that’s clear then. This is like a disorienting Woody Allen movie with a good cast. So, it’s like Melinda & Melinda then?
Well, actually, I guess it sort of is like Deconstructing Harry, which I assume is the “Woody Allen flick” that Rems attempts to make a trend out of in that sentence by adding the word “any.” In that movie, characters drift in and out of a characters’ mind and are replaced by their fictional counterparts. What he dreams comes true. Actually, now that I think about it, I should buy me a copy of Deconstructing Harry; what a terrific movie.
There is a scale of what these movies that are “difficult” and “puzzling” must sit on. On one end, you have the junk – the Ranaldo and Claras or Inland Empires, bits of brain-scrambling randomness that pretend an overriding concept unifies its spasticness and makes up for how numbing the experience of watching it is (both mentally and physically – I can’t remember when my ass fell asleep in Inland Empire). On the other end, you have Wild Strawberries and Mulholland Drive and 8 ½ and Robert Altman’s 3 Women – movies that are strange and exciting and unusual and reveal beautiful, well crafted layers underneath their prickliness.
Synecdoche, I think, is somewhere shy of the middle there, meandering ever slightly to the junk side of the scale. Or so I thought. I suppose I like the opportunity to think about life and what happens in our world, and like a movie speaking in its images and ideas and not worrying about what “sense” it makes. Altman says he wrote 3 Women transcribing a dream he’d had the night before. What’s that movie about? Why, a woman who infiltrates another woman’s life, or a painted swimming pool, or maybe the delusions and shifting alliances shared by women, who are all acting out roles in each other’s worlds. Something like that. Actually, I rewatched 8 ½ the day after I saw Synecdoche, and I think it launches the best defense for that movie. In a spa, Guido, 8 ½’s main character, gets spoken to by a fat writer he walks down a set of stairs with. “You’re dealing with the complexities of the human mind, you should at least be clear about it.” Fellini clearly has little patience for this mindset.
And why should he? Life, our minds, are a mess, after all. Movies and writing can get at a portion of it. The brilliance of 8 ½ is that it is, in fact, so lucid and well conceived an evocation of the difficulty to reflect life and wonder in art, to express what is actually true. The calling card (or, my favorite quote) of that movie is a line by its wandering critic: “It is better to destroy than to create what is inessential.” Fellini no longer wanted to tell a boy-meets-girl story and instead wanted to focus on what really drives us and exists in our minds.
Synecdoche has probably received more comparison to 8 ½ than any other movie. If so, Charlie Kaufmann should be very flattered. 8 ½, derided by its detractors as a movie which flailingly tells the story of a director flailing, is actually the most lucid movie ever conceived about writers block, or artistic stagnation, or why we do what we do. Synecdoche, by never quite giving limits or sense to its central play, is never really about art, or at least it has very little interest in the “art” concept except as something marginal, like that burning house.
But again, here I go trying to define the rules that Synecdoche broke in order to prove it as a less than worthy movie. It’s just too damn much work for the thoughts you get out of it. Now, I love movies that make me work. I’m up for the job. But for this? Synecdoche is sort of like a long conversation with your very smart, sad friend over drinks – which is to say like any drunken ramble, it hits home once in a while. But have you really not had these thoughts before? Which ones can Synecdoche claim as its own?
These are the questions Synecdoche really makes me ask. I love movies that make me question my world, our approach to seeing it, movies whose ideas and approaches make me want to experience them over and over again. Yet is it doing nothing but using themes of man’s ultimate unhappiness in the world as a justification for a rambling incoherent movie, or the other way around? I guess I simply mean that these senses, as any good writing professor would tell you, need to be reined in a little. And thinking so doesn’t make you incapable of deep thought.
It took Roger Ebert declaring it the best movie of the 2000s, but I have finally seen Charlie Kaufmann’s Synecdoche, New York. Have you heard of it? It made around $4 million domestically, which doesn’t quite recoup its $20 million budget, or even properly pay for the massive set-within-a-set that creates the movies meta-textual centerpiece.
While Ebert and other critics are certainly big fans, that gross suggests it didn’t connect elsewhere. My beloved film critic sage Owen Gleiberman led the brigade of Synecdoche haters on its release, giving the movie a D+, stating, essentially, he wanted to give up on the movie and declare the whole thing “the structure of psychosis.”
More than that, though, Gleiberman – an extraordinary writer always beholden to his viewpoint – seemingly reacted this strongly based on what he perceived others’ responses to be, and accurately predicted (not that anyone would really do otherwise) that a cadre of “eggheads” would declare the movie a masterpiece. Certainly Ebert believes so. Humble as ever, Ebert stated that he saw the movie a first time, “believed it to be a great movie, and that I had not mastered it.” Interesting viewpoint.
Ebert’s sense of the movie has more of a grasp of contemporary standards over all. When is a movie allowed to be a confusing masterpiece, rather than just confusing? We all know 2001 was released to baffles in 1969, but enough people were able to get behind that to make it now considered a classic. What about the career of Ingmar Bergmann, who essentially popularized the pretentious, challenging film? Reading Ebert’s comments, I was reminded that so many of these artists of difficult, important movies were not always considered to be such forward-thinking geniuses – those movies too had to be released and reacted to. Likely that initial reaction was bafflement.
My reaction to Synecdoche is sort of bafflement, but sort of that it wasn’t quite worth the bother. As a declared “love it or hate it” movie, it gives an ample amount of ammunition to each side. There are scenes that are cracklingly fun in Synecdoche, and touches of absurdity that make you appreciate the ability of a movie to travel in its own weirdness. There’s the house Samantha Morton’s Hazel lives in, which is always on fire, prompting Hazel to voice concern, like 20 years before her death (who can keep track of this timeline anyway), that she’s concerned about “dying in the fire.” Instead, the house feels cozy, and ridiculous. There are the hilarious scenes with Hope Davis as a rather terrible psychologist who attempts to sell her book Getting Better to her clients for $40 and writes in one unrelated bit of pep vagueness after another – a run in between her and protagonist Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) on a plane is memorably demented and puzzling. I also loved its time-keeps-on-rapidly-ticking-away pace that makes the years sweep by, which reminded me, in its way, of the David Chase-directed final episode of The Sopranos. Then too monumental events seemed to be going by, like life does, before we could even get a good grasp of them.
There are moments too, through the nuttiness, that something interesting and deeply true is hit upon. Caden asks Hazel, somewhere 10ish years past their failed romance, to look at him as she once did, with love and awe. It’s a theme of the movie that people are adept at ruining each other’s pristine images of one another. That idea is ripe for a movie, and actually, despite its logical jumping jacks, Synecdoche comes at that theme with admirable clarity.
But then, there are also scenes that seem rather obsessed with saying something, I don’t know what it is, about obsessing over a few characters’ sexuality. Or the stuff about Jungian psychology. There’s that play within the play and the set within the set and the play within the play within the play. I have to list some of these things out to make sure they were there at all. Plus I have to think no one would write a character named Millicent Weems without that name signifying… something. In describing the movie, Kaufmann said he wanted to move away from gimmicks like "mind portals and memory erasing" - describing, of course, his deeply-accessible-by-comparison scripts of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Well, I hate to point out to him that his "gimmicks" are what work best for him - the burning house is a gimmick, so is Davis's wacky psychology book. In effect, his "play," given more attention, might be a great gimmick in itself.
Watching Synecdoche and trying to describe it with the same approach as other movies is rather tiring and unwise. Yet most movie reviews stick to just that, strangely. Says Emily Rems of Premiere: “At turns as neurotic and nebbishy as any Woody Allen flick, as creepy and disorienting as your favorite "Twilight Zone" episode, and as steeped in magical realism as the most moving Márquez novel, Synecdoche may not be the feel-good date movie of the year.” Ok then. Or Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, “As a director, Kaufman isn't yet his own best salesman. He's not enough of a visual stylist to sell his script's most challenging conceits. But the cast rises to a very strange and rich occasion.” Well that’s clear then. This is like a disorienting Woody Allen movie with a good cast. So, it’s like Melinda & Melinda then?
Well, actually, I guess it sort of is like Deconstructing Harry, which I assume is the “Woody Allen flick” that Rems attempts to make a trend out of in that sentence by adding the word “any.” In that movie, characters drift in and out of a characters’ mind and are replaced by their fictional counterparts. What he dreams comes true. Actually, now that I think about it, I should buy me a copy of Deconstructing Harry; what a terrific movie.
There is a scale of what these movies that are “difficult” and “puzzling” must sit on. On one end, you have the junk – the Ranaldo and Claras or Inland Empires, bits of brain-scrambling randomness that pretend an overriding concept unifies its spasticness and makes up for how numbing the experience of watching it is (both mentally and physically – I can’t remember when my ass fell asleep in Inland Empire). On the other end, you have Wild Strawberries and Mulholland Drive and 8 ½ and Robert Altman’s 3 Women – movies that are strange and exciting and unusual and reveal beautiful, well crafted layers underneath their prickliness.
Synecdoche, I think, is somewhere shy of the middle there, meandering ever slightly to the junk side of the scale. Or so I thought. I suppose I like the opportunity to think about life and what happens in our world, and like a movie speaking in its images and ideas and not worrying about what “sense” it makes. Altman says he wrote 3 Women transcribing a dream he’d had the night before. What’s that movie about? Why, a woman who infiltrates another woman’s life, or a painted swimming pool, or maybe the delusions and shifting alliances shared by women, who are all acting out roles in each other’s worlds. Something like that. Actually, I rewatched 8 ½ the day after I saw Synecdoche, and I think it launches the best defense for that movie. In a spa, Guido, 8 ½’s main character, gets spoken to by a fat writer he walks down a set of stairs with. “You’re dealing with the complexities of the human mind, you should at least be clear about it.” Fellini clearly has little patience for this mindset.
And why should he? Life, our minds, are a mess, after all. Movies and writing can get at a portion of it. The brilliance of 8 ½ is that it is, in fact, so lucid and well conceived an evocation of the difficulty to reflect life and wonder in art, to express what is actually true. The calling card (or, my favorite quote) of that movie is a line by its wandering critic: “It is better to destroy than to create what is inessential.” Fellini no longer wanted to tell a boy-meets-girl story and instead wanted to focus on what really drives us and exists in our minds.
Synecdoche has probably received more comparison to 8 ½ than any other movie. If so, Charlie Kaufmann should be very flattered. 8 ½, derided by its detractors as a movie which flailingly tells the story of a director flailing, is actually the most lucid movie ever conceived about writers block, or artistic stagnation, or why we do what we do. Synecdoche, by never quite giving limits or sense to its central play, is never really about art, or at least it has very little interest in the “art” concept except as something marginal, like that burning house.
But again, here I go trying to define the rules that Synecdoche broke in order to prove it as a less than worthy movie. It’s just too damn much work for the thoughts you get out of it. Now, I love movies that make me work. I’m up for the job. But for this? Synecdoche is sort of like a long conversation with your very smart, sad friend over drinks – which is to say like any drunken ramble, it hits home once in a while. But have you really not had these thoughts before? Which ones can Synecdoche claim as its own?
These are the questions Synecdoche really makes me ask. I love movies that make me question my world, our approach to seeing it, movies whose ideas and approaches make me want to experience them over and over again. Yet is it doing nothing but using themes of man’s ultimate unhappiness in the world as a justification for a rambling incoherent movie, or the other way around? I guess I simply mean that these senses, as any good writing professor would tell you, need to be reined in a little. And thinking so doesn’t make you incapable of deep thought.
