TIFF Review: Synecdoche, New York

You are reading this because you want to know if Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is a good film, and perhaps you want me to compare and contrast it with the great screenplays he has written, and hopefully in the process provide a categorical frame to this new commodity. What must a press screening of such a film look like, what sort of deadening halt could be felt, to pens and paper, to stillborn thoughts, as the anarchy of Kaufman’s imagination marched mercilessly through its two hours? What language other than the poetic can one even begin to articulate the activity of that fugue?

Rest assured, this ‘review’ will not give away anything, for it would be as pointless as describing a blob of colour carefully set within a Monet landscape, or quoting a line from a Beckett play, the activity of this story is one of patterns. It may take your mind an hour or two, or even days to adjust to the pattern recognition required to make sense of what Kaufman is doing with this story. So is the possible genius of the work; I’m still uncertain what happened, what I even feel about it. The dense narrative works not in scenes, nor arcs, nor traditional transitions, but everything both real and unreal, past, present and future coming together on the same cosmic stage. I was unable to understand it in the fashion I am accustom to, but after awhile the pervading ideas and emotions emerged like one of those 3-D illusions, the dissociative details forming a lived-in impression of loneliness, heartache, and death. The Russian doll ellipses, apparently random tangents, and gaping time lapses, provide just the right amount of disorientation to evoke the revelation, to have the sadness of life creep up on you and inhabit you.

As the synapses fire blanks, a new seeing emerges, the seeing not of characters and story on a separate stage from us but as us, surveyors of our own lives, inhabitants of insecurities and absurdities that brush shoulders with one another in unscripted indecencies, all loose ends that are felt beyond the academic rigor of existentialism or the theatre of the absurd. As characters in the film perceive fictionalizations of themselves we perceive the characters, and perceive ourselves watching the characters. As the puzzle of perception unfolds, deeper and deeper into the time lapse, any remnant of analytical thought is exhausted by the onslaught of highly stylized quasi-subconscious details that run through, and in the flurry of all these simultaneous assaults on the mind, one either tunes out or tunes in to a whole new wavelength.

The originality of the film is staggering, even by Kaufman standards. Its unparalleled sophistication of storytelling is something only a Beckett or Kafka could imagine, not even Lynch, I suspect, could have the patience for this well-laid detonation of meaning. Kaufman’s directorial debut is aggressively auteur, it is, as Cameron Bailey noted in his introduction to the film, the purest distillation yet of the mind of Charlie Kaufman.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is a theater director whose ambition to capture the true meaning of life escalates into citywide sets of thousands of actors all on his cue. This review is now over.