Breaking down the fourth wall and smashing it to smithereens

Surrealistic masterpiece creates the ultimate existential dilemma.
4 1/2 stars

Knowing writer Charlie Kaufman’s (Being John Malkovich/Adaptation) warped sense of humor, I figured the misspelling of Schenectady, New York was a set up for a cool in-joke. Turns out “synecdoche” is a real word meaning, “a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole (as society for high society), the whole for a part, the special for the general or the general for the special, or the material from the thing made from it. (as boards for stage).” As confusing as its definition, Synecdoche New York just happens to take place in Schenectady. This movie is a surreal mess, mesmerizing in its complexities, perfectly depicting depressing beauty with stunning diatribes of madness, loneliness and despair. It’s also a hilariously dark comedy, conveying the intricacies of life, sex, and death.
Directing for the first time, Kaufman’s brainchild begins with a straightforward story, but after a few minutes things start to twist. The first few hints involve the misinterpretation and mispronunciation of words. Kaufman then begins to fill the screen with more images and ideas at a rapid pace pausing only to bludgeon us with some gross-out scenes and “why-are-they-doing-that” moments. Soon we figure out that it’s not going to do us any good to try and make sense with this time-spanning journey. Just sit back and enjoy the circus.
The story’s main character, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a depressed stage director with marital problems and some mysterious health ailments .Hoffman’s character last name refers to “Cotard’s syndrome”, also known as “nihilistic” or “negation delusion”, which is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that he or she is dead, does not exist, is putrefying or has lost his/her blood or internal organs. (This definition sums up most of the idiosyncrasies we see cultivated by our main character.) He decides to write and direct his own opus. Trouble is this endeavor encompasses his real life and all it entails so much that it’s constantly being written/rewritten and rehearsed (on a daily basis) making it impossible to be produced or even performed. It simply becomes the ongoing staging of a bigger-than-life-sized play of Caden’s life, never to be finished. At one point an actor says “when are we going to put this on -- it’s been 17 years...” This brings us to another dimension—chronological time is messed with as much as our heads. Synecdoche becomes metaphor city and it’s up to us as to how we construe our own opinions of what’s happening on the always-filled screen, as if interpreting our own dreams. Taking the adage of life imitating art and vice versa to new heights, characters switch roles as they rehearse; at times we get 2-3 actors playing the actors we are watching interacting with 2-3 other actors playing another character in the play at the same time--confusing but highly entertaining.
The cast is up to the task. Hoffman’s lonely, despondent Caden comes off with such inner turmoil that he speaks loudest when silent. The strong female ensemble (Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Hope Davis, Emily Watson, Michelle Williams) all deliver powerful, funny and sexy performances. Character actor Tom Noonan has never been better almost stealing the movie.
While SNY takes potshots and stabs at art, it also holds art in high regard, almost reverently. I get the feeling Kauffman is so enamored with art that he’s embarrassed by that fact, and therefore uses its power to make one of the most artistic, poetic statements in recent movie history. He dissects traditional ideas showing us that the abstract is the norm and the chasing of dreams is futile. Life, sex and death just fall into repetition mode while we humans exist simply to make mistakes, wither and die.
Sometimes SNY seemed like a demented version of Hesse’s Steppenwolf, other times a David Lynch nightmare world of nonsensical imagery, but what it all boils down to is that you just have to accept what you see and give into the surrealism of it all. Let the vivid images be what they are and go where they take you. To its vast credit, no matter how dizzying the movie becomes, when the characters show real emotions in the midst of the garbled mess, we drop all preconceptions about how we want things handed to us in a constructive believable way and feel compassion for the troubled fellow characters we see on screen.
As we’re invited to share the inner-workings of Caden’s brain, SNY seems to convey that everyone has random and disconnected thoughts, but the thread is that they are YOUR thoughts connected to YOUR brain until the day you die. Caden puts it best when he says, “There are nearly thirteen million people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They’re all the leads of their own stories.”
This movie culminates in a very sobering exploration of death and identity--who are we/why are we here/why do we do the things we do? Synecdoche, New York is an either an existential nightmare or a beautiful poetic vision. I just can’t tell -- I am going to have to watch it again to see if I agree with myself.

Synecdoche, New York
Starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Hope Davis, Emily Watson, Michelle Williams, Tom Noonan
Written & Directed by: Charlie Kaufman