Charlie Kaufman is not a “gloom head.”
So he says one night, sitting in a quiet corner in a downtown Denver hotel. And if you’ve seen the intricate, existential comedies he has famously penned, you know that.
“Being John Malkovich” was a surreal plunge into the mind of the actor via an office-building portal. It starred Catherine Keener, John Cusack, Cameron Diaz and Malkovich, who does a crazy turn as himself, sort of. It was directed by Spike Jonze.
Jonze also directed “Adaptation,” which told the story of a writer overwhelmed by a project to bring New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean’s book about orchid lover John Laroche to the screen.
Nicolas Cage plays the anguished screenwriter and his twin. That scribe’s name: Charlie Kaufman.
In “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Jim Carrey plays a guy who learns that his ex has undergone a procedure that erased him from her memory.
Now the writer whose sensibility has shone through in movies that he didn’t direct has directed his first film.
“Synecdoche, New York” stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden, a playwright living with wife Adele (Catherine Keener) and young daughter Olive.
As the movie opens, the youngster is pooping green and being told by Adele, an artist who paints miniaturist portraits, that she’s fine.
Fluorescent-colored waste, a house perpetually aflame, a theater production that grows larger and larger until it vies with reality — these are just some of the welcome mats to Kaufman’s elaborately constructed film.
There are deep wells of humor. But the movie is not a comedy. It isn’t even your typical atypical Kaufman comedy.
This has been something of a rub. Since its premiere at Cannes, the film has been praised but also derided for being grim and gloomy.
“There are some that say it’s the best movie they’ve ever seen,” says Kaufman. “And others who are so mad at it.”
Just that morning, he had learned that a reviewer had given the movie a barely passing grade.
“Don’t grade my movies, something I worked on for five years,” he says. “Don’t give it a letter. It’s crappy. In many ways it’s a crappy world.”
While Kaufman may not be a gloom head, he is, that night, tuckered. He has been to Europe twice and to 10 U.S. cities in support of the film. Later that night, he’ll get in a car that will take him to Boulder for an 11:30 Q&A at the University of Colorado.
“It’s awful,” he says with quiet intensity. “It’s punishing and it’s kind of crappy.” He stops himself from complaining more. “This has been my mode throughout the entire tour. I’ve decided I’m not going to care what I say.”
Exquisitely humane
But we care greatly what he says. In conversation, the writer-director elicits many of the feelings his exquisitely humane “Synecdoche” does: He makes one excited, amused, blue and perplexed at being human.
Anchored by Hoffman, who appears “in 202 of the 204 scenes,” the film is a mad, mad, mad, mad ensemble piece. Art- house luminaries Samantha Morton, Dianne Wiest, Hope Davis, Emily Watson, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Michelle Williams are key players.
“Synecdoche” is one of those words that is difficult to pronounce and one of those notions that isn’t at all easy to grasp. Says Merriam-Webster: “It is a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole . . . the whole for a part . . . the species for the genus . . . the genus for the species.” OK.
It’s also just enough of a near- homonym for a certain New York city to make you grin.
Schenectady is where Caden lives and where he begins — with the monetary help of a MacArthur “genius grant” — to pursue his masterwork. As the movie progresses, his creation vies with his reality.
Toward the end of postproduction, the movie’s finale came into question. The suits were concerned, Kaufman says. “They worried it was alienating and detached.”
But he surprised himself. He wrote a new ending, one he believed stayed true to the emotional rawness. “I figured out a way to do it,” he says with understated relish. “I presented them with a new last scene. They loved it, they really loved it. And it was clever, so clever.”
Then he showed it to Hoffman, who told him to stick with the truth of the original. So he did.
“We spent a lot of time talking not only about the character and his relationship to the world, but also about time passing and children and family and relationships and regrets.
“It was this amazingly intimate period we had with each other. He was so committed to finding the truth of the movie that I could trust him,” Kaufman says.
That trust has had its touching upside.
Kaufman recounts a stop in Austin, Texas, where he received a standing ovation.
“When I came out to talk, a guy came up to me, the sort of guy who would scare me,” says Kaufman, who is slim and not particularly tall. “So this guy came by and he had a crew cut and said, . . .” — here Kaufman takes on not the twang, but the baritone of the man — ” ‘I just want to tell you I’m a Texan tough guy, and this movie made me cry out of both my eyes.’ ”
Kaufman smiles gently.
Charlie Kaufman is not a gloom head. Far from it.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@ . Also on blogs.denverpostcom/ madmoviegoer
