SYNEDOCHE, NEW YORK     

 

Dir. Charlie Kaufman / 2009

 

APPARENTLY, the job of the armchair critic watching Synedoche, New York is to decide whether it’s a soaring masterpiece or monumental self-indulgence. Well, leaving aside the notion that a film maybe both of these things at the same time, Synedoche, New York, it turns out, is neither.

 

It is a film about the terrible twin truths of existence: life is disappointing and death inescapable. The film cannot be taken literally but isn’t a fantasy and to stay with it, it has to be given a degree of “reality” status.

 

Caden Cotard, theatre director (played by Philip Seymour-Hoffman) is unhappily married to Adele (Catherine Keener) and is deeply dissatisfied with the staleness of his work. His unhappiness manifests itself in hypochondria, therapy and a fear of sexually available women. 

 

His depressed introspection drives away his wife and young daughter and ensures his subsequent affairs are temporary. There is time to deliver a well-aimed kick at America’s wealthy and bogus purveyors of cod-psychology before a form of therapy tailor-made for the self-obsessed Cotard lands straight into his lap.

 

Given a seemingly limitless “genius” endowment which gives him the freedom to leave behind the mediocrity and constraints of his industry, Cotard has a plan. He will build a stage set of apartment buildings, fill them with actors who will create lives, and years will go by while his company rehearse and improvise with no audience. He hires actors to play himself and characters from his life and the gulf between make believe and reality collapses.

 

The project spins far beyond anyone’s ability to contain it and therefore must itself rumble onwards merely in parallel to its creator’s life and not in aid of it.

 

As the play and its actors become part of the life of those it portrays, it gives rise to much playful mimicking. As the tribulations of Caden Cotard are visited and re-visited first via the film and then through the play and then through the film again, the whole project is in danger of tripping up over its own conceit.

 

As a film Synedoche, New York the film does not aspire to the epic status of Cotard’s play and works best when it is infused with the gentle humour and vulnerability at its heart. Fortunately, this is the theme to which Kaufman returns as his characters enter their dotage.

 

It is to Kaufman’s credit, and a blessing for the audience, that he surrounds Cotard by women who gently and not so-gently puncture Cotard’s vanity without themselves being presented as paragons of a stable and fulfilled existence.

 

This is a feminine film that sensibly side-steps neat solutions for issues of timeless concern to give us a moving take on one man’s haphazard attempt to navigate his way through a life lived.

 

Dave Boyer