The Wardman Wire

Abbot Gensler © Sony Pictures Classics

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a theatre director whose marriage falls apart as he is struck by a strange neurological condition – and who, handed unlimited funds for his work, realises a mad artistic vision of his own life -  and all life – in a vast, hangar-like space in New York. He hires actors to play himself and his lover Hazel, and life and representation merge till we are no longer sure who is director, who is actor, and what, if anything, is real.

It’s not easy to summarise Synecdoche, New York: it has to be seen to be believed. I’ve enjoyed Charlie Kaufman’s work as a writer in the past – Being John Malkovich was an original, strange comedy, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was a terrific conceit with an interesting take on human relationships. This, though, is Kaufman’s first outing as a director, and it’s stranger even than those films, by some way.

What’s so strange about it? Everything, really. From the moment Caden bumps his head and begins his mental degeneration, it’s unclear how what we see relates to real life. The whole film employs a sort of dream-logic. Yet at the same time, Synecdoche resembles Being John Malkovich in showing life in its unglossy, worn reality. Other strange things are the way characters not only play each other, leading to a multiplication of doppelgänger, but begin to merge into each other, as Caden merges into Ellen Bascomb (or is it Millicent Weems?) towards the end; and the way the film plays with time, as years go by imperceptibly, then are retraced, and as characters age in unpredictable ways, impossible to track. In these ways Kaufman builds up a non-linear story, told at least in part visually, through symbols: the unsettling fire at Hazel’s flat arguably prefigures a real event at the end of her life.

The performances are all strong – not just Hoffman’s as Caden, but also Samantha Morton’s as Hazel and Emily Watson’s as the actress playing her. The rest of the cast supports well, too. The acting, then, certainly isn’t among the flaws in a film which feels neither finished nor polished and which is too long, by half an hour I’d say; there is only so much out-and-out strangeness you can take, and after ninety minutes or so, Synecdoche, New York is already exhausting. Yet that’s the point at which it starts being seriously unusual. Arguably Kaufman’s vision as a director, while compelling both in its fantasy and in its view of the humdrum texture of life, doesn’t take off in a visually, photographically artistic sense. These are footling quibbles, though. This is an important and fascinating film, if at times infuriating, and Kaufman is a serious director who’s made an incredibly ambitious, in-your-face artistic film. I enjoyed it, and want more from him.

Apart from its dramatic originality, Synecdoche, New York includes some entertaining satire on therapy – Hope Davis is great as a disturbing, masochistic, self-publicising counsellor, and her sudden leaping off the page on to Caden’s flight to Berlin is one of the film’s best moments. There’s also satire on art, with the smallness of what now makes celebrity artists famous and rich made literal in Adele’s work. Synecdoche, New York is a plea for art to aim at greatness, at saying something about life and at moral scale, and though Caden fails to bring the whole world within his theatre, we’re glad he’s tried, as we’re glad Kaufman has tried. The result is the kind of stupendous, uncontained art its creator is arguing for. If it doesn’t feel polished, well – perhaps it shouldn’t.

So this is a film not only about art, but about life. Do we live in any way authentically, or are we simply playing roles? Are we the directors of our own drama – or just poor players on the stage? Synecdoche, New York is about all this. It may be flawed, and I’ve said I think it’s too long. But for all that, it’s magnificent, and even its most infuriating, exhausting, bemusing half hour is more worth seeing than a lot of films.