Heavy mental

Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New
York is a brain-bending and heart-rending
drama of extreme complexity

INTELLIGENT DESIGN: Catherine Keener

by MALCOLM FRASER

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman breathed some intelligent life into Hollywood with Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the underrated Human Nature. His directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, is so complex it makes his earlier work look like a cheap reality show. The early press descriptions, mentioning a playwright who builds a life-sized model of New York City, have the odd combination of giving away an important part of the plot while not even remotely scratching the surface of the film’s story or themes.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden, a theatre director in the small New York town of Schenectady. A neurotic hypochondriac, he’s married to painter Adele (Catherine Keener), and they have a young daughter; at work, he amiably fends off the advances of young receptionist Hazel (Samantha Morton). When Keener up and leaves for Berlin, taking their daughter with her, Hoffman is plunged into a depression. Soon after, he gets a huge grant and decides to embark on an ambitious theatre project that consumes the rest of his life.

Up until this point, the film has been a more or less straightforward domestic drama with a few notable touches of whimsy. But when Hoffman begins his project, it turns into something quite different—and difficult to describe, incorporating magic realism, dream logic and multiple layers of self-reflexivity.

The closest comparison would be David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, with which it shares a fascination with blurring fiction and reality, an affection for abstract symbolism, and a complete lack of concern for traditional narrative sense. It also occasionally suggests a cinematic equivalent of the late David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, with its grandiose ambition, overreaching intelligence, pained humanity and meta mind-bending.

Hoffman, Keener and Morton are brilliant as always, and they’re supported by an amazing cast including Hope Davis, Dianne Wiest and Emily Watson, among many others. The film is beautifully designed, shot and edited, and Jon Brion’s great music adds emotional weight. But the challenge of Synecdoche isn’t just in its complexity; it’s a heavy film, its tone ranging from melancholy to bleak, with even the occasional comic relief still of the dark variety. Highly recommended, but only if your brain and heart can handle some pain.

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK OPENS
THIS FRIDAY, NOV. 14