Towards the end of Annie Hall (1977), there is a re-enactment of events from
earlier in the film, identical but for a few key differences. Alvy (Woody
Allen) and Annie (Diane Keaton) are portrayed by a pair of actors ten years
their juniors (Charles Levin, Robin Mary Paris), and this time, their
argument outside a health food restaurant ends in resolution. Alvy addresses
the camera. “What do you want from me? It was my first play”, he says,
explaining by way of apology that “you’re always trying to get things to
come out perfect in art because it’s real difficult in life”.
The screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who was born in New York in 1958, is in many
ways the worthiest heir to Allen’s throne. While the other contenders
(Albert Brooks, Larry David) seek to emulate features of Allen’s persona,
Kaufman has taken a pick’n’ mix approach to the director’s work. He has
adopted Allen’s God-is-dead nihilism but left behind the life-is-sweet
optimism that has traditionally acted as its foil and salve. He is a
follower of the Allen who created and played Mickey the hypochondriac in
Hannah and Her Sisters (1986); the Allen who likes to engineer Kafkaesque
collisions of the fantastic and the mundane – the Allen who resembles Philip
Roth more than Neil Simon. But crucially, Kaufman has modified Allen’s
conception of the life–art relationship. His characters aim to get things to
come out imperfect and amorphous in art – just as they do again and again in
life.
Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman’s first film as a director, is constructed
around the principle of that scene in Annie Hall – with the difference that
the differences are fewer; things still turn out badly. The film concerns
Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a clapped-out theatre director who
attempts to stage a dramatization of thousands of ordinary lives inside an
abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn. This fifty-year work in progress, funded –
at least initially – by a 2009 MacArthur Fellowship, is intended as Caden’s
middle finger to mortality, but the demands of such extensive verisimilitude
prove difficult to meet.
After seventeen years of false starts and dead-ends, Caden decides to make the
piece more straightforwardly autobiographical, and a man named Sammy (Tom
Noonan) is hired to play him. With his elongated body and bulbous head,
Sammy (Tom Noonan) doesn’t much resemble the tubby director, but it emerges
that he has been stalking Caden for twenty years, which makes him relatively
well-equipped for the role. Sammy’s behaviour may suggest madness, yet there
is Method in it. Soon enough, though, an actor must be brought in to play
the actor who plays Caden; a scale warehouse must be built inside the
warehouse to represent the warehouse that houses it; and so on.
Like the majority of Kaufman’s male protagonists – they are too downbeat and
spineless to be called heroes – Caden cuts an Allenish figure: neurotic,
guppy-mouthed. Over the course of six screenplays, Kaufman has amassed an
unhappy family of such types, a sad-sack sextet. Craig Schwartz, the
struggling-and-failing puppeteer in Kaufman’s first screenplay, Being John
Malkovich (1999), speaks for all of them when he says that “consciousness is
a terrible curse”. He is also the mouthpiece for Kaufman’s alternative
cogito: “I think, I feel, I suffer”.
The new film adds a handful of glum mottoes. Addressing his large cast at
their first meeting, Caden explains: “We are all hurtling towards death”. A
geriatric on an aeroplane quietly informs Caden: “Death comes faster than
you think”. Before leaping from a rooftop, a man screams: “None of us has
much time”. In a piece of minor exaggeration, the film depicts a world where
ill-health and discontent are universal. The majority of phone calls bear
terrible news. Characters produce green excrement and urine that looks like
Coca-Cola. There are pustules, protruding veins, infected tattoos. We hear
about “synaptic degradation” and “progressive dementia” and “chromosomal
damage”. When Caden isn’t toiling on his unfinishable piece, he is in
waiting rooms and surgeries. The film contains four funerals but only one
wedding, prelude to a joyless marriage.
Kaufman’s take on the mind–body problem is simple: everything is bodily. The
brain, where feeling and memory reside, is just another fallible organ. As
Kaufman sees it, the human being is a machine, like an old PC or a
second-hand car; its days are numbered. Life begins to end at forty. One of
the reasons why consciousness is a curse is that it entails consciousness of
one’s body. The first customer who pays $200 for the pleasure of being John
Malkovich gives his reason for wanting to “be someone else”, as the advert
promises: “I am a fat man. I am sad and I am fat”. Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas
Cage), the exhaustively self-analytical screenwriter in Adaptation (2002),
provides a succinct summary of his situation: “All I do is sit on my fat
arse. If my arse wasn’t fat, I would be happier”. Kaufman reconciles the
interests of Samuel Beckett and Susie Orbach. In his work, fat is an
existentialist issue.
The anatomical emphasis has shifted in the new film. Caden is more worried
about his boils than his belly. Despite being in a miserable physical
condition which only gets worse as the film progresses, Caden has serious
relationships with three attractive women – his first wife Adele (Catherine
Keener), a painter of miniscule portraits who goes to Berlin for an
exhibition of her work and never returns to him; his second wife Claire
(Michelle Williams), an actress who eventually gets tired of playing
herself; and Hazel, a box-office attendant whose behavioural tics would be
insufferable if performed by anyone other than Samantha Morton. Hazel is the
one that got away because Caden let her. It is a mistake that he spends half
a century regretting.
Synecdoche, New York is an attempt to capture in one view the human being’s
relationship with mortality and the creative artist’s relationship with
reality. The uniting theme is time. The film dramatizes the way in which
time can be at once protracted and foreshortened. It covers fifty years –
from 2005 to 2055 – in twenty-four hours (and 120 minutes). The opening
scenes take place over half an hour – from 7.45 am to 8:15 am – during which
a month passes. Caden is not oblivious to the fleeing of time – just
powerless to do anything except explore it in his work. In the production of
Death of a Salesman which is causing him trouble at the film’s start, Willy
and Linda are played by young actors. And whatever else it might be, the
warehouse experiment constitutes an attempt to create a work of art which
has approximate temporal parity with life.
Like Ulysses, another work with a congested twenty-four-hour time-frame, the
film is frequently very funny about the contingency of meaning and
reference. One is reminded particularly of Joyce’s ear for near-tautological
congruities – Bloom slamming the door tight until it shut tight, passing his
arm through an arm-strap, and so on – in little jokes like Hazel’s scrapbook
which is full of scraps. Kaufman presents the problems of language as
essentially bodily – that is, aural. In Being John Malkovich, there is a
secretary with hearing problems who has convinced her boss that he has a
speech impediment (and that she has a doctorate in Speech Impedimentology).
Most of the difficulties in the new film are caused by homonyms and
homophones. “I think I have blood in my stool”, Caden tells Adele. “That
stool in your office?”, she replies. And there is dialogue that plays on
Turkey and turkeys, pipe (drain) and pipe (tobacco), psychosis and sycosis.
Even the film’s title is a sound-alike. Caden comes from Schenectady – the
city in eastern New York state where Cyril BassingtonBassington has his
disastrous rehearsal in The Inimitable Jeeves.
The film contains many unaccountable events. Caden imagines himself into
adverts and cartoons. Hazel buys a house that is permanently aflame. “I like
it, I do”, she tells the estate agent. “I’m just really concerned about
dying in the fire.” When Caden and Hazel bump into each other after years
without contact, she explains that she is in New York on holiday with her
husband Derek (a loathed name in Kaufman’s work) and her twins, “Robert and
Daniel and Allan”. It often seems as if Caden’s off-stage life has been
carefully arranged to teach him lessons. Everyone he knows has a symbolic
name – Keen, Lack, Gravis. The name of his older daughter (Olive) might be
viewed as an injunction. Most incidents take place twice – at least – as if
Caden were being given the opportunity to handle or understand things
better. He doesn’t take it.
In his previous screenplays, Kaufman has provided explanations for the
phenomena depicted. For most of its length, Being John Malkovich appears to
be a work of surrealism, but it turns out to be a piece of extremely
far-fetched science fiction. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) –
the title comes from Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” (1717) – never pretends to
be anything else. In the new film, Kaufman withholds more. There are clues,
though. Caden’s surname, Cotard, is the name for a delusion in which the
patient believes that he or she is dead; there is a repeated visual
reference to Capgras, the name for a delusion in which the patient believes
that a loved one has been replaced by an impostor. (In an early draft of
Adaptation, Kaufman suffered from Body Dysmorphic Disorder, in which the
sufferer exaggerates or imagines a physical defect.) Allusions and
references to Anne Sexton, Prospero, Krapp, and Joseph K, some of them more
oblique than others, conspire to suggest that Caden is in bad shape,
psychologically.
It is difficult to believe that this is Kaufman’s first film as a director. He
displays little evidence of fumbling or feet-finding. With the help of Jon
Brion’s grandly miserable score, he sustains the film’s defeatist tone; by
employing a palette of browns, greens and greys, and depriving the viewer of
establishing shots, he achieves a suitably unnerving aesthetic. And his
handling of actors is impeccable. There are fine-grained performances, full
of pathos and unlikely comedy, from Seymour Hoffman, Morton, and Williams.
In smaller roles, Timothy Doyle, Diane Wiest, and Emily Watson (playing
Hazel’s Tammy to Caden’s Sammy) are excellent.
In the past, Kaufman’s material was better served by the spoilsport deadpan of
Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) than the pile-it-on,
like-with-like approach of Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind), and the new film seems to express this preference. Indeed, it seems
pertinent to think of Synecdoche, New York as the third part in a triptych.
Like the Jonze films, it concerns the difficulties faced by the committed
artist in an age of commerce and commodification. Caden’s struggles with his
spiralling work are mocked by the success of Adele’s tiny portraits; Craig’s
controversial puppetry is neglected while the “gimmicky bastard” Derek
Mantini wows onlookers, as a television report puts it, with a
sixty-foot-tall Emily Dickinson doll; Charlie Kaufman toils fruitlessly at
adapting Susan Orlean’s memoir The Orchid Thief (1998) while his moronic
twin, Donald, is praised for his multiple-personality serial-killer script.
The three films are particularly attuned to the relationship between
intractable problems and miraculous solutions. In each case, the solution is
a mirage.
Synecdoche, New York is a defiant, go-for-broke experiment, but it displays
little of the hysteria, gigantism and obscurity that often mar such works.
It is formally and structurally extravagant; freighted with incident and
detail, but dramatically modest. Even at its most ornery, it is grounded in
the comic mundane. No doubt some will dismiss it with obvious if
appropriately bodily metaphors – the navel, the fundament – or reduce the
film’s details to familiar meanings via a process of allegorical
substitution, tit for tat. Kaufman slips these nets. He has made Caden’s
“massive theatre piece” and Hazel’s house fire and Adele’s miniatures both
gently metaphorical and irreducibly particular.
He has also come close to realizing Caden’s own ambition: to create a work
about “everything – dating, birth, death, life, family – all that”. The
film’s message, more serene promise than snarling threat, goes something
like this: ungentle regrets are un-avoidable; ruinous disorders will follow
us unquietly to our graves; we are doomed to look on as our loved ones
perish, unless we beat them to it. But as delivered by Kaufman, the message
is oddly consoling. It helps that he treats the futility of existence as
suitable material for comedy; the film’s lugubriousness would be unbearable
if it weren’t so inventively amusing. And after all of Caden’s fear about
his inevitable destination, the nowhere of life’s end, the film concludes
with a monologue that celebrates driving, as an end in itself.
