It’s kind of a miracle: despite their seemingly uncommercial subject matter, their somewhat off-putting sense of humour, and their intellectually challenging approach to storytelling, somehow not only have Charlie Kaufman’s scripts attracted the top actors, directors, and designers in Hollywood, but they’ve won Oscars and even achieved a respectable level of box-office success. The career of Charlie Kaufman is a beacon of hope to aspiring screenwriters everywhere.Or at least it would be if you didn’t actually watch his movies. It’s hard to think of another writer whose provides a bleaker, more despairing depiction of life as a creative artist than Charlie Kaufman. From John Cusack’s tortured, struggling street puppeteer in Being John Malkovich to Nicolas Cage’s tortured, self-loathing screenwriter in Adaptation to Sam Rockwell’s tortured, sociopathic game-show host in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Kaufman’s characters have never acquired the slightest shred of happiness, fulfillment, or wisdom through their art; instead, art diminishes their spirit, alienates them from their families and loved ones, and ultimately kills them or drives them insane.
And so, the central joke in Kaufman’s latest film Synecdoche, New York (his first as a director), is that when theatre director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) lands a MacArthur “genius grant” that gives him the freedom to realize any theatre project he can dream of, no matter how massive, it’s more a death sentence than a cause for celebration. Cotard’s body is falling apart already — he develops sores on his face, he falls prey to unaccountable seizures, he loses the ability to cry or produce saliva, his leg starts jiggling uncontrollably, he appears to be aging at a faster rate than anyone around him — but when he begins working on an autobiographical theatre installation big enough to fill an empty warehouse, the untitled project begins to seem as much of a disease as any of Cotard’s physical ailments.
It’s a cancerous project that consumes and metastasizes everyone who comes in contact with it: Hazel (Samantha Morton), the pretty box-office attendant Cotard begins dating after his wife Adele (Catherine Keener) runs off to Germany with their daughter Olive; Claire (Michelle Williams), the beautiful actress with a crush on Cotard; Sammy (Tom Noonan), the mysterious man who stalks Cotard for years before auditioning to play Cotard in his warehouse project; not to mention the hundreds of actors and technicians who’ve spent the last 17 years rehearsing their lines and building sets without any sign of an audience ever showing up. Identities shift, genders blur, time loses all meaning, and Cotard himself gets older and sadder, to the point where even his memories of his beloved Olive — who has apparently grown up without him and become a tattooed lesbian stripper in Berlin — cease to provide any comfort. Cotard becomes an extra in his own play, imaginatively exhausted, trudging slowly and unnoticed through the grey, miserable wonderland he’s built while various fake Cotards take over the running of the project.
The movie is monumentally depressing, but it should also be said that the first hour or so is as funny as anything Kaufman has ever written, full of absurdist exchanges of dialogue (Cotard, reading the morning paper: “Harold Pinter just died. Wait, no, he won the Nobel Prize”), offbeat running jokes (like Cotard’s therapist’s worsening skin infection, apparently caused by her strappy high-heeled shoes), and crazy visual setpieces (like the snippet we get of Cotard’s production of Death of a Salesman, in which he attempts to enact a car crash onstage). When Cotard reads in a magazine that someone has given little Olive a full-body tattoo, Claire can’t understand why he’s so upset: “Everyone has tattoos!” she shouts, lifting up her shirt to reveal a gigantic devil tattoo covering her entire back. Cotard, utterly nonplussed, replies, “Well, I’ve never noticed that before.”
I suspect that I’ll be making that same comment a lot the next time I watch Synecdoche, New York, which seems almost too layered to completely take in the first time through. After the screening, for instance, my friend and fellow SEE writer Michael Hingston noted that the scene late in the film involving a younger version of Dianne Wiest’s character had already appeared on a TV screen much earlier in the film as part of a pharmaceutical commercial. I bet I missed dozens of similar touches.
What I came away with the first time through was a deep admiration for Kaufman’s ambition, and for how his fiercely miserabilist worldview is tempered by his unusual empathy for his female characters. Samantha Morton especially comes off well here — she often gets cast literally as a muse (as in Sweet and Lowdown, Mister Lonely, and Dreaming of Joseph Lees, among others), and she performs that role again here for both Cotard and Kaufman, remaining dazzled by the possibilities of creativity long after all the other participants in Cotard’s project have been bled dry by it. Kaufman pulls one of his slyest casting jokes when Emily Watson appears late in the film as the actress hired to play Morton’s character. I was sure Sally Hawkins from Happy-Go-Lucky would show up soon to play Watson, but Kaufman doesn’t take things that far.
Indeed, it’s too bad that Hawkins never appears, because Kaufman really seems like he could use some cheering up. Hell, forget Kaufman: I just saw Synecdoche, New York a few hours ago and I’m so bummed out I don’t know if I ever want to write another word.
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