‘Synecdoche, New York’ is one of the greatest cinematic disappointments I have ever experienced.
One of my favourite screenwriters, the striking and original Charlie Kaufman, has made a directorial debut so removed and bloated half the cinema walked out from my screening. The film (eventually) deals with a theatre director Cotard’s (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) attempted masterpiece, a life-sized staged reconstruction of New York City. As a film it feels more in-tone with the surreal ‘Being John Malkovich’, with a dimmed colour palette and at times oppressive mise-en-scene. The characters are standard Kaufman, and this is a film full of fun ideas. However, despite this it ultimately and resolutely fails. The script cries out for the cohesive reigning vision of a Gondry or a Jonze, instead finding no boundaries from this writer-turned-auteur. Not only is this Kaufman’s most self-indulgent work, but his most boring, morbid, flaccid and grey. The film is a congealed mess, a bucket filled with good ideas and rich concepts around performance, death, masculinity, art, urban life, decay and God, but unstructured and unexplored. It feels akin to having a bucket of partially digested ingredients to a selection of 5-star meals slowly poured over you; uncomfortable, purposeless, confusing and cold. Every idea is a good one, but you can’t just throw unprocessed musings at an audience and call it a completed work of art.
One of my favourite screenwriters, the striking and original Charlie Kaufman, has made a directorial debut so removed and bloated half the cinema walked out from my screening. The film (eventually) deals with a theatre director Cotard’s (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) attempted masterpiece, a life-sized staged reconstruction of New York City. As a film it feels more in-tone with the surreal ‘Being John Malkovich’, with a dimmed colour palette and at times oppressive mise-en-scene. The characters are standard Kaufman, and this is a film full of fun ideas. However, despite this it ultimately and resolutely fails. The script cries out for the cohesive reigning vision of a Gondry or a Jonze, instead finding no boundaries from this writer-turned-auteur. Not only is this Kaufman’s most self-indulgent work, but his most boring, morbid, flaccid and grey. The film is a congealed mess, a bucket filled with good ideas and rich concepts around performance, death, masculinity, art, urban life, decay and God, but unstructured and unexplored. It feels akin to having a bucket of partially digested ingredients to a selection of 5-star meals slowly poured over you; uncomfortable, purposeless, confusing and cold. Every idea is a good one, but you can’t just throw unprocessed musings at an audience and call it a completed work of art.
I’m aware that many of the same criticisms could be levelled at the play at the film’s centre, that these issues of indulgence, over-reaching and purposelessness are the very issues the film intentionally explores. If that is so, then I’d argue that if Kaufman recognises that these aspects are bad, that they hold back art, why then does he offer neither insight nor solution? If the film itself is an extension of the play, didn’t he realise he’d alienate and bore his own audience as well? I found Cotard‘s view of death especially frustrating
“I’ve been thinking a lot about dying lately… Regardless of how this particular thing works it-self out, I will be dying… and so will you… and so will everyone here. And that’s what I want to explore. We’re all hurling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive… each of us knowing we’re gonna die… each of us secretly believing we wont.” - Cotard
It’s the same indulgent view of death as a 14-year old emo kid in some U.S. suburb. After all the events of the film, this is Cotard‘s great insight? Because that’s the kind of knowledge and experience worth waiting for. It is deeply disappointing that the same pen that nailed human relationships so well in ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ completely misses when it comes to an individual’s existence. Although a more visual director could have made the piece better, by putting more focus on the film’s strengths (The amazing NYC set for example, mostly glimpsed at.), they could never change the cold, removed basis upon which the story is built. For a film just over 2-hours long, it feels like 5. It’s almost as if Kaufman himself is as uninterested and unimpressed with human life as his characters. What’s most depressing is he never truly tells us why.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about dying lately… Regardless of how this particular thing works it-self out, I will be dying… and so will you… and so will everyone here. And that’s what I want to explore. We’re all hurling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive… each of us knowing we’re gonna die… each of us secretly believing we wont.” - Cotard
It’s the same indulgent view of death as a 14-year old emo kid in some U.S. suburb. After all the events of the film, this is Cotard‘s great insight? Because that’s the kind of knowledge and experience worth waiting for. It is deeply disappointing that the same pen that nailed human relationships so well in ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ completely misses when it comes to an individual’s existence. Although a more visual director could have made the piece better, by putting more focus on the film’s strengths (The amazing NYC set for example, mostly glimpsed at.), they could never change the cold, removed basis upon which the story is built. For a film just over 2-hours long, it feels like 5. It’s almost as if Kaufman himself is as uninterested and unimpressed with human life as his characters. What’s most depressing is he never truly tells us why.
** (UK Release 15th May 2009)
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ReplyDeleteWow. I guess if its a matter of taste. Its an exploration, and certainly not a neat, tidy and answer giving film. Anyway, each to their own, although I will point out that the cotard quote you put is one I laughed at in the cinema, it comes at the begining of the play process, and is ridiculous. The film intentionally points out that being "meaningful" (like in the priest scene) is often laughable and self indulgent.
ReplyDeleteFor me its the blackest of black comedies, with a painful honesty thats unique, and an exploration a wealth of ideas, a portrait of what it means to be alive at the tail end of post-modernisim.