Movies: Synecdoche, New York * *
(15A, limited release)
"The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast," Oscar Wilde once wrote. In the case of Synecdoche, New York, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut, the world is indeed a stage, and it is brilliantly cast. It's just that the play itself is a huge disappointment. In fact, it's pretty disastrous.
He may have penned some of the last decade's most imaginative and dazzlingly original films (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and his Oscar-winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), but clearly Kaufman needs an objective director who can curtail his worst excesses. Here, there is nobody to shout stop, and the initially-promising Synecdoche quickly collapses into a mind-melting, uninvolving, maddeningly oblique, painfully self-important, and, most damning of all, boring, muddle.
How to summarise it? Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as Caden Cotard, an ailing theatre director who has been abandoned by his artist wife (Catherine Keener) and daughter for a new life in Berlin. With the help of an arts grant, Cotard buys a warehouse in the New York burb of Schenectady (the movie's title is a play on that place-name as well as an obscure literary term meaning a part that represents a whole), and inside constructs a huge mock-up of the city. He hires actors to play himself and his loved ones, but soon the line between fact and fiction is obliterated as Cotard's sense of reality disintegrates.
It's a fantastic concept, but its execution is totally cack-handed. Kaufman has stated that he wanted to make a movie that "reflected the interior life of a person". Alas, that interior life would appear to be his own, and boy is it a scary, confusing, frankly insane place, and certainly not "representative of the whole".
This one is going to divide critics and the public like few other modern movies. Where one will see profound symbols, images and metaphors, another will see infuriating, faux-intellectual drivel. In short, this is a barely admirable failure, and gets its two-star rating purely for the initial idea and its assemblage of modern cinema's best female talent.
- Declan Cashin
