Day 18/18 - Synecdoche, New York (2008)

I once took my students to an art exhibit where all the paintings were white. It took them a long time to wrap themselves around the idea that chosing to paint white was actually using all the colors of the spectrum.

I felt much like my students trying to wrap my head around Director/Author Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, starring Philip Symour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Samatha Morton, Michelle Williams, and Dianne Wiest. The actors were brilliant, but I was totally thrown by things being out of kilter. Things happened I couldn't figure out: a character goes to look at a house for sale which is on fire. She buys the house and whenever we see the house there are flames seen burning. The script makes a big point it is Halloween and a doctor, supposedly the next day, has a calendar on his wall which states it is March. One of the characters says that she has twins, and then gives then gives three names.

Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a theatre director who gets hit in the head, and from then on we move into a world that we think we understand but don’t. Eventually Caden wins a MacArthur grant and uses his money to construct a growing, huge set of New York, peopled with actors preparing the individual scenes for the audience that will someday come.

Reality bends even more when he hires actors to play himself and others to play the people in his lives.

Caden fears death throughout the film. He sees himself, however, director of his universe. He at one point expresses surprise that there are 13 billion people in the world and that none of them are extras in their own stories.

When Caden feels the need for a replacement of his original double, the actress Millicent Weems (played by Dianne Wiest) who had been hired to play a cleaning woman (Ellen) asks to take over the part. When asked what she knows of the character, she gives us the real clue to the film:

(Millicent) Caden Cotard is a man already dead. He lives in a half world between stasis and anti-stasus. Time is concentrated, chronology confused. Up until recently he strived valiantly to make sense of his situation. Now he’s turned to stone.

Near the end, she becomes Caden’s director—speaking to him through an ear-mike. Her monogue becomes the most beautiful part of the film and speaks to all of us of a certain age facing an uncertain future. Let me quote Millicent/Ellen’s brilliant speech written by Kaufman:

Stand up. Now it is waiting and nobody cares. And when your wait is over, this room will still exist. And it will continue to hold shoes and dresses and boxes and maybe someday another waiting person. And maybe not. The room doesn’t care either. 

What was once before you an exciting mysterious future is now behind you, lived, understood, disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence and now are slipping silently out of it. This is everyone’s experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone is everyone. So you are Adelle, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You are Ellen,  all her meager sadnesses are yours. All her loneliness. The gray strawlike hair, her red raw hands. It’s yours. It is time for you to understand this. 

Walk. 

As the people who adore you stop adoring you,
as they die,
as they move on,
as you shed them,
as you shed your beauty, your youth,
as the world forgets you,
as you recognize your transience,
as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one,
as you learn there is no one watching and there never was,
you think only about driving. Not coming from any place. Not arriving any place. Just driving. Counting off time:

Now you are here. It’s 7:43.
Now you are here. It’s 7:44.
Now you are gone.

I think of many of the elderly friends that I have seen age and I realize how clearly they would understand this metaphor of life.

When I started this review, I thought I would write about how much the film confused me, but writing about it, I realize how brilliant it is.

Synecdoche, New York (2008) *****