"I know how to do it now. There are nearly thirteen million people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due."
I think we’d all like to have a little more control in our lives. Maybe we’d like to be able to make millions, or defy the swift hand of death and disease. Yet, we really only have control over ourselves and that will never cease to be. But, some men and women make a living by controlling the lives of others. Said people are also known as writers. Aside from God, writers are one of the few entities that have control over their world completely. This is obvious not only because they construct the world their story takes place in, but also the characters that inhabit it. Furthermore, the writer dictates the actions and situations the characters find themselves in, and implicitly they understand everything that happens. This notion is something that escapes us in everyday life as we yearn for something meaningful to find in our lives. Perhaps writers are lacking any sense of internal locus of control, or maybe I’m reaching beyond the notion that writers just want to tell a story. But, in the case of Charlie Kaufman’s labyrinth film “Synecdoche, New York”, a sense of control very well may be the driving force behind the film’s main character, Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). In “Synecdoche”, you’re guaranteed to see one of the most ambitious films within the last decade. Featuring the typical Kaufman mind fuck screenplay, “Synecdoche” is a film that is nearly impenetrable, as it throws countless thematic arcs at us and seemingly transitions through time at inordinate speeds. If you thought Kaufman’s previous work was mind boggling, it doesn’t come even close to matching the narrative structure he achieves here.
The film opens up with theater director Caden Cotard receiving a MacArthur grant after crafting his version of “Death of a Salesman”. After achieving such a distinction, Caden, perhaps being a little pretentious, decides he wants to use the grant to create a meditation on life. Initially it’s a random approach, but one that comes more into focus once Caden’s life starts to unravel. He is a man who, at least in his mind, has declining health. More specifically, he feels that his bodily functions are slowing down. This is a rather humorous notion for Caden who’s last name is also the term for a psychiatric disorder where a person believes they’re dead. But, eccentricity becomes the least of Caden’s problems when his wife leaves him and takes their young daughter with. In his mind, Caden has been betrayed by his body and his family. Yet, this provides Caden with inspiration for his new play. His goal is to create a massive theater piece that entails everyone's life with a heavy dose of brutal honesty. Such honesty is focused on the fact that we all die, we all suffer, and we are all alone. This is a rather nihilistic paradigm for Caden to associate with, but the world as he knows it has been falling apart at a steady rate. So, through his play, Caden hopes to control life’s destructive habits, as well as find some semblance of understanding within his prototypical world.
Yet, Caden’s ambition and determination to create a world of his own, but one that plays by the rules of real life, gets the best of him. What once started out with a handful of people, swells to the size of a thousand people, which eventually turns in to a cast of millions. Consequently, Caden’s stage increases in size until he finally has a replica of a city residing in a warehouse. Yes, I can only imagine how incredulous the last few sentences sound, but things only get more surreal as reality and Caden's play start to collide. Soon, Caden realizes that because he's doing a piece about real life, he must include himself and his play because they’re part of a reality he’s trying to project. So, Caden hires an actor to play himself, and then an actor to play the actor playing himself. Thus as his play grows deeper, he hires actors to play actors, and the warehouse his play once resided in becomes a warehouse within a warehouse. The play continually grows deeper into itself to the point that reality not only shifts for the viewer, but also for Caden. As the years pass, and new lovers come in and out of Caden’s life, he’s constantly digging deeper into his fantastical life-scale model just to try and understand his own life. Despite always being in control of his work, Caden never seems to grasp the meaning of his existence. So, he dives further to the point that it consumes him. The question becomes: is everything that’s happening on screen real? Are the people he surrounds himself with real? Hell, is even Caden real? With Kaufman’s lack of concrete answers, he dares the audience to decipher the film for what it means to them. It’s quite beautiful to see the film open so many doors to the point that it is almost impossible to have one certifiable theory.
Featuring a plethora of red herrings and piercing symbolism, the film screams for multiple interpretations. One line of dialogue can have you thinking one thing and then 20 minutes later, a slip of the tongue by a character can change that. The audience is never totally in the loop, and when it comes down to it, Kaufman puts the heart of the film and the meaning on the shoulders of the audience. Much like dissecting the meaning of life itself, we are left to sort through the beautiful mess and find an answer we find acceptable based on the evidence presented (or what we've seen) in our everyday lives. There are no easy answers within Kaufman’s realm, and having the balls to create a film this open ended is something you don’t see in this day and age. More so, you have to call back to the days when Fellini was running cinema through his dreamscape and Bergman was installing his films with symbolic subtext to find a film as ambiguous as “Synecdoche” As you can imagine, the subject matter is a tough task for any director, but in his directorial debut, Kaufman is more than able to take his vision from the page to the screen. Granted, Kaufman probably could’ve whittled down the film’s grand scale just a bit, but he’s got a terrific cast that forms ethos amongst the foray of realities collapsing on one another. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is especially great in the role of Caden, as he amplifies Caden’s desires and neuroses against Kaufman’s grungy color scheme. Acting against Hoffman is the radiant Samantha Morton who plays Hazel, the love of Caden’s life who seemingly slips through his grasp as he chooses to exert control over his broken reality instead of his actual love life.
As much as I’d love to dictate the ultimate experience of “Synecdoche, New York”, much like life, it’s something that is probably more understandable when experienced for yourself. In my experience with the film, I feel it’s simply about finding some form of control in one’s life, as well as the artist’s need to replicate life in order to understand it. Of course, this is merely my interpretation and doesn’t make my first paragraph canon. The interpretations are endless and contingent on how we perceive Caden’s realities. Simply put, Kaufman has created a dizzying film that initially aims to knock you off your feet, but willingly gives you the power to pick yourself back up to decide what it was that knocked you down. It’s truly a movie full of possibilities or better yet, a film full of life.
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