Tedious ambiguities
I've often thought Charlie Kaufman’s biggest accomplishment has been parlaying his success into almost unprecedented status as a screenwriter whose name is recognizable to the general public. I'm a movie fanatic and I can name maybe ten individuals in that profession, past or present. His clever scripts for Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind certainly helped, but I think he accomplished the feat mainly by pulling the brilliant stunt of writing himself in as a character in Adaptation, thus leapfrogging director Spike Jonze as the more active creative hand.
Screenwriters have about as much pull in the Hollywood hierarchy as House Republicans now have in passing legislation, so that was sheer self-marketing genius. Kaufman became an actual brand, of which the cognitive dissonance created by tinkering with the varying realities inherent in movie-watching is a primary trait.
Synecdoche, New York is Kaufman's directorial debut. We went to see it in El Cerrito on Baby Brigade night, when infants are welcome and can spit up in a stranger's popcorn with impunity. When young Hildy coughed up a globule of milk before the opening credits had even finished, I thought it a premature assessment. But she turned out to be prescient.
The film starts off fine. Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a stage director married to Adele (Catherine Keener), a painter of distorted portraiture in the vein of Francis Bacon. Both seem on the verge of a nervous breakdown, or at least a nervous break-up. Caden’s unspoken obsession with death anchors a malevolent foreboding and an oppressive atmosphere of depression and decay. “Harold Pinter died,” he enthuses, glancing at the morning paper. “Oh, wait, he just won the Nobel prize.” Soon, a bathroom pipe explodes in his face and he breaks out in a rash. And among all the attributes of his shrink's shapely form, his sole focus is an ugly toe protuberance. The play he's directing, of course, is Death of a Salesman.
Everyone looks tired and sad and spent, an effect put to greatest use by Keener, who manages to augment her signature heart-of-stone persona with some genuine vulnerability. The tone is ultra grim, but the script is sharp and builds a good deal of tension, as the film careens toward what feels like some promising existential horror. The peak level of entertainment is reached in this bit of dialog, in the office of a couples therapist played by Hope Davis:
Adele: I fantasized about Caden dying.
Therapist: Caden, does that feel terrible?
Caden: Yeah.
Therapist: (brightly, denoting great progess) Good!
(CONTINUED)
