All the world’s a stage, literally, for Caden Cotard. A small-time theater director in Schenectady, N.Y., he becomes the unlikely recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant and spends the windfall on a vast avant-garde theater piece about “everything.”
His play is set in New York City, which Caden re-creates with an army of actors on a life-sized set inside a vast warehouse. Then a second warehouse must be built inside the first, with more actors impersonating the original cast, and a performer must be hired to play the director of that production; soon we’re tumbling down a very convoluted rabbit hole.
Welcome to “Synecdoche, New York,” population everybody. Synecdoche (seh-NEC- duh-key), if you don’t have your Webster’s handy, is a figure of speech in which a specific thing represents a class (like Webster’s for dictionary).
Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a pudgy, alienated, sexually insecure stand- in for all humankind, fussing over projects that come to nothing as time ticks away. The film opens with the buzzing of Caden’s alarm clock and ends with him drifting into unconsciousness again. Depending on how you read the film’s deftly smudged time scheme, either 50 years have passed, or five minutes.
Caden has lived, or hallucinated, a sprawling lifetime.
“Synecdoche” is the first film written and directed by the infinitely clever Charlie Kaufman, whose mind-bending scripts for “Adaptation,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Being John Malkovich” created a new genre of naturalistic absurdism. It takes enormous assurance and skill to pull off this kind of meta-story, and Kaufman succeeds; nothing in his direction says “rookie.”
Here one character lives in a house that is on fire, a situation that visitors accept as perfectly normal. Another sports floral tattoos that shed actual leaves. A third appears in a TV cartoon before turning up in Caden’s real life (if we can call it that). The effect isn’t preposterous but beguiling. Like Caden, Kaufman aims for truth-telling through artifice. The difference is that Kaufman rarely hits a false note.
The film is overstuffed with information, including tributes to David Lynch and Samuel Beckett, Fellini and Borges and Pirandello.
It’s no accident that our Job-like anti-hero’s first name means “warrior” and his surname signifies the psychological disorder whose sufferers imagine themselves to be dead. But you don’t need to catch the scholarly references to understand the film on a gut level.
Caden’s struggle is common to us all.
He’s determined to create meaning in the face of ultimate futility.
He’s laughably fragile, subject to calamities accidental (a water faucet explodes, scarring his forehead), biological (bloody gums, leprous pustules) and a suffocating lack of human connections. He’s absorbed in staging drama, but emotionally absent from the women in his life.
And what a colorful parade they are. His vinegary wife, Adele (Catherine Keener), a painter of stamp-sized portraits, has transferred her affections to her best friend (and lover?) Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Caden rebounds with his theater’s bubbly box-office clerk, Hazel (Samantha Morton), but obsesses about the absent Adele. Later he marries Claire (Michelle Williams), an ingenue awed by his poppycock directing style, only to find he can’t stop thinking about Hazel and her magical ability to cheer him up. Ironically, he’s at his most engaged when Hazel takes charge, directing him through silly little love scenes.
He can cope with his melancholy life only through art. Yet that art is compelling enough for a cast of thousands to follow his direction.
“It’s a play about death. Birth. Life. Family. It’s about everything,” Caden explains. But as his vision unfolds farther and wider, he begins to mistake the map for the territory.
The actors are sublime. Hoffman is rumpled, grumpy and timid as a turtle, yet capable of scalding outbursts. His longing to connect, to create some legacy in the face of looming death, gives his piecemeal life a sort of meaning, and Hoffman’s sad, hungry eyes make it real.
Hope Davis is as cool as an ice pick as the therapist overseeing Caden and Adele’s decoupling. Emily Watson, as the actress brought in to represent Hazel in Caden’s play, does a wonderfully layered job.
Kaufman’s casting here is devilishly sly; casual moviegoers can’t tell Watson and Morton apart anyway.
Our anti-hero’s malaise is ruefully amusing, but the film doesn’t mock him. There’s great sympathy in this portrait of a ninny.
Kaufman is too truthful to tack a happy ending on his story, but too kind to deny us any chance of solace. He gives us an ambivalent fade-out that extends the possibility of hope, if only in our ability to hug and comfort one another.
Near the finale, the aged Caden tells Hazel, “God, you’re perfect.” She sensibly replies, “I’m a mess, but we fit.” And so is the film, a tangle of loosely linked episodes of human fallibility that miraculously add up to an epiphany of acceptance.
It might even mean something that when the story is over, we don’t fade to black but bathe in radiant white light. When that house finally burns down, when that spigot in your forehead ultimately explodes, that would be a nice way to go.
