Charlie Kaufman (2008)
The protagonist of Charlie Kaufman’s first feature as a film director is a theatre director, Caden Cotard, who is increasingly conscious of mortality – especially his own. (I didn’t get clear what Caden’s age was at the beginning of the film. Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays him and who is forty-one, wears a darkish wig at the start of proceedings, which may be meant to make him look younger. It certainly succeeds in making Caden look more unhealthy.) Caden’s artist wife Adele leaves him, taking their infant daughter Olive with her, to set up a new life in Berlin – under the baleful influence of a lesbian friend, Maria. Caden learns that he’s won a ‘MacArthur Genius Award’. (It sounds like a joke but the much sought after grants handed out by the MacArthur Fellowships scheme really are nicknamed ‘Genius’ awards.) He decides to use the money for an extraordinary theatre project, based in a Manhattan warehouse, in which he aims to describe his life, and the lives of other people in his life, in New York City – to recreate the entirety of his world and represent the whole of NYC. He casts actors to play himself and the people he knows. The latter include the actors in the project and Caden then has to cast other actors to play the actors and crew. So the project continues to expand and the distinction between it and Caden’s consistently unhappy life away from the set gets increasingly blurred. Years – decades – pass. The people who matter most to Caden die; so does the warehouse personnel; so, finally, does Caden.
In the film’s early stages, the ubiquity of death is grimly amusing. The following are just a few examples. Caden wakes, on the first day of autumn, to hear an academic talking on the radio about the new season being ‘the beginning of the end’ of the year. He picks up a newspaper to read an obituary of Harold Pinter (a lucky flying start for Kaufman, in terms of getting across the inevitability of death, since the picture was made when Pinter was still alive). There’s a public information film on television about a killer virus. Caden is neurotically concerned with his bodily deterioration, even before an accident in the bathroom puts him in casualty. From there he’s sent to see an ophthalmologist, who refers him to a neurologist. (These medics are coldly, professionally cryptic in their diagnoses.) Caden is directing a production of Death of a Salesman with a young cast; he urges the actor playing Willy Loman to approach the part more empathetically – to realise that, although he’s much younger than the character, the real tragedy of the enterprise is that he too will die one day. The Cotards’ counsellor-therapist is called Dr Gravis.
Quite late on in the story, an actor playing a priest in Caden’s warehouse extravaganza delivers a speech exhorting the putative audience – us – to make the most of our lives, reminding us that we spend aeons unborn or extinguished and very little time alive in between: we squander most of that time in vague regret about wasting the life we’ve had so far and ‘even vaguer’ hope for something better to come. (The actor playing the priest-actor is Christopher Evan Welch – so we get to see the face behind the narrator’s voice in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.) Charlie Kaufman’s preoccupations in Synecdoche, New York call to mind Woody Allen’s wrestling with the pointlessness of life in a Godless universe but, although both men present their fear of death in largely verbal terms, the physically gross manifestations of illness and aging are unignorably in evidence here in a way they would never be in an Allen film. We see Caden’s excreta and his checking for blood in them – and, after watching Synecdoche, I can see why David Edelstein recently criticised Philip Seymour Hoffman’s ‘tendency to stress the grotesqueness of his characters, an instinct (possibly self-hating yet sadistic toward the audience) he mistakes for integrity’. I’m not sure I agree with Edelstein but Hoffman does look terrible – a bloated mess. His physical degeneration both explains and externalises the way Caden feels inside. The trouble is, Hoffman is such a powerfully expressive actor that the make-up seems a gruesome tautology. He’s affectingly convincing as a thoroughly wretched man without the visual aids of bad skin and pasty devastation.
Kaufman never makes clear whether Caden is a hypochondriac – perhaps he thinks that the surname tells us enough. According to Wikipedia, ‘Cotard delusion or Cotard’s syndrome, also known as nihilistic or negation delusion, is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that he or she is dead, does not exist, is putrefying, has lost his/her blood or internal organs. Rarely, it can include delusions of immortality.’ (Kaufman’s protagonist is definitely not one of the rarities.) After the physiological detail in the early parts of Synecdoche, it becomes hard to tell whether Caden is delusional. He takes handfuls of tablets each day but this looks to be a purely neurotic routine. Whatever’s wrong seems to cause him manageably few physical problems. Kaufman’s point is presumably that it’s ultimately irrelevant as to whether Caden is imagining things – since he’s not imagining that he will die: for as long as he goes on living he goes on dying. The insistence of the theme – ‘Look, everybody: we’re all doomed to everlasting annihilation’ – gets to feel a bit adolescent, even if it is triggered by the fear of a middle-aged man (Kaufman is fifty). The writer-director seems to suggest that, if we all recognised and faced up to the fact, we would all be Caden Cotard. (Kaufman brings to mind the sentiments of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘The Old Fools’ – ‘Why aren’t they screaming?’ – but without Larkin’s variety of tone.)
Yet it’s this insistence that makes Synecdoche, New York a distinctive film about death. It doesn’t have death-inflected images that make an impression the way Bergman’s images do in The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries or Winter Light. It doesn’t have the nimble wit of Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters. But the bluntness gives Synecdoche weight. It would be hard to claim that the Bergman films sidestep the reality of death but it could be argued that the richness of their images distances an audience from that reality, at a conscious level anyway. Woody Allen skilfully but evasively extricates himself in Hannah: Mickey, the character he plays, is confirmed as a hypochondriac – which is to say that he gets a clean bill of health for the immediate future. As a bonus, it turns out the doctor who diagnosed Mickey as sterile got it wrong; and seeing a Marx Brothers picture is enough to make Mickey feel that life’s worth living. Charlie Kaufman may appear to be brutally honest in comparison but he has his own evasions. He makes Caden so absolutely gloomy that there’s nothing enjoyable in his life, no suggestion of things Caden would enjoy if they weren’t being crushed by his awareness of death. Woody Allen’s idea that life is meaningless if there’s no God skirts the question of how much knowing that a supernatural being exists would make life meaningful. (Unless God is defined as a being with an inherently meaningful purpose which is beyond our understanding – which can only be an intellectual assertion, emotionally unsatisfying.) Kaufman, for his part, is scared by the prospect of unending nothingness but doesn’t address the implications of surviving for ever: the irony is that the gruelling barrenness of life as it’s lived by Caden Cotard makes this a more urgent question in your mind – what if existence like this went on for ever? Kaufman overlooks the fact that the prospect of everlastingness is terrifying, whether it’s everlasting being or everlasting nothingness.
A secondary irony is that we do, of course, in spite of Charlie Kaufman’s determination to exclude the possibility of them, experience consolations in watching Synecdoche, New York. There’s the pleasure of witnessing some unassailably excellent actors, the pleasure of experiencing Kaufman’s own talents. Like each of the three screenplays which made his reputation (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), his script here is structurally imaginative and often funny. Kaufman’s showoff love of unusual words may be another symptom of immaturity but I find it appealing. Caden’s surname is only one example (Leo Robson came up with plenty more in his TLS review of the film): he keeps trying to think of a suitable name for his theatre project, the first idea he comes up with is ‘Simulacrum’, and Kaufman obviously prefers ‘Synecdoche’ only because it’s an irresistible pun on ‘Schenectady’ (where I assume Caden is based before his move into NYC). Having such an uncommon word in the name of a picture resulted in an interactive vocabulary quiz on the BBC website (‘A new film, Synecdoche, New York, is out, and it’s [sic] title is likely to have cinemagoers scratching their heads …‘). When Caden’s daughter asks about the pustules on his face, he tells her the skin complaint is called sycosis and explains its difference from psychosis.
Because Kaufman’s already such a big name as a screenwriter – we tend to see him, as much as Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, as the auteur of Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine – the assurance he shows first time out as director is likely to be underrated: you don’t really think of him as a beginner. He handles the cast confidently and sensitively and he brings off the disorienting, discomforting timeframe of the story with great skill. For a while, it’s hard to get your bearings and to work out whether some of what you’re seeing is Caden’s paranoid fantasy. The uncertainty is effective in itself – it increases your sense of the absurdity of his experience (the film’s main theme is already pretty clear). Then you realise that it is all happening and that time is moving forward with horrifying speed. This chimes with Caden’s remark at a rehearsal in the theatre, ‘We’re all hurtling toward death’ (that also recalls Larkin and his description to a friend of his own impending end – ‘spiralling towards extinction’). Even though Kaufman’s thoughts about death aren’t new, he uses the Sisyphean challenges of controlling the scope of the warehouse project and holding back the years in a very striking combination – to illustrate the impossibility of getting a stable perspective on life either as a human being or (in his/Caden’s experience anyway) as an artist. The immediate effect of Synecdoche, New York is to cause you to look at people – and experience yourself – differently. Walking from the Curzon Soho to Waterloo, I couldn’t shake off a sense that everyone on the street was taking part in a ridiculous performance or the feeling that I was in a capsule. And the music stays with you – not just Jon Brion’s grave theme but the affectingly simple ‘Synecdoche Song’ (sung by Deanna Storey), with music by Brion and lyrics by Kaufman.
Philip Seymour Hoffman is supported by a group of actresses that includes Catherine Keener (emotionally fine-tuned, as always) as Caden’s first wife, Michelle Williams (vivid and nuanced) as his second, and Samantha Morton – as Hazel, who turns out to be the love of his life. (I think the only sequence in which Caden doesn’t appear is the one in which Hazel decides to buy a house – a house which is permanently on fire.) When we first meet Hazel, she’s working in the box office at the theatre where Caden is staging Death of a Salesman. She moves on to various relationships with him during the film – perhaps best to summarise her as his helpmate. Morton is highly likeable and resourceful in this role: as the decades pass, the eccentrically eager spirit of the younger Hazel is never lost but it’s modified by advancing years and a growing melancholy. Both Morton and Hoffman age very convincingly (except for the prosthetic jowls which Kaufman attaches to Morton’s face when Hazel’s an old woman). Hope Davis is amusingly disturbing as the counsellor-therapist. It’s great to see Dianne Wiest again – as Millicent, an actress-cum-cleaning lady in the warehouse project. (When Caden auditions Millicent and says, ‘You’re weirdly close to what I had in mind’, Wiest gives her reply – ‘Glad to be weirdly close’ – a wonderful, tart ruefulness.) Jennifer Jason Leigh is the friend who accompanies Adele and Olive (Sadie Goldstein, later Robin Weigert) to Berlin. Emily Watson, as Hazel’s alter ego Tammy, is, as usual, both striking and too aware of the camera. Tom Noonan is Sammy, who turns up at the auditions explaining that he’s been shadowing Caden for twenty years and gets to play him. (Sammy’s suicide from the summit of the warehouse set – an act which goes beyond Caden’s near suicide from an apartment balcony – is graphically shocking.)
I’ve seen reviews of Synecdoche only by the people I usually read – Anthony Lane, David Edelstein and Stephanie Zacharek in the USA, Edward Lawrenson and Leo Robson over here. Sally also showed me an interview with Kaufman in the Evening Standard; the author of this piece saw the picture as a flawed work of genius. Lawrenson and Robson think better of the film than the US-based trio and Robson is hugely impressed. Because this excellent young writer (he’s twenty-three or twenty-four) is himself so impressive – in the breadth of his frame of reference, his analytical skills, the brio and precision of his expression – you hesitate before disagreeing. But I think Synecdoche, in spite of its compositional originality and its emotional heft, is a work of ingenuity rather than of genius. In the second half, the multiplying doppelgangers of Caden and the other principal characters seem to be worked out in a basically mechanical way (like much of the wiping of memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). And I don’t think Robson’s right that Kaufman treats ‘the futility of existence as suitable material for comedy’. He delivers funny moments here because of his comic instincts rather than as a directorial choice. The lugubrious monotone and palette of the film – as if these were the only way to treat the subject of death honestly – are unoriginal, a failure of imagination.
22 May 2009