...about a movie where the acting is
exceptional, and in the case of Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffmann,
brilliant?
...about a film filmed
in 65mm format using Panavision’s System
65mm camera. The process can be projected in 70mm and is stunning, giving some
of the most glorious film images of recent years?
...about both Phoenix and Hoffman portraying men you can
alternately love and hate. I find it difficult to identify with morally bankrupt characters.
...about the protagonist hallucinating at a party and seeing all the women in the
room—of a variety of ages up their 70s or 80s—nude and bouncy?
...about Amy Adams, of Doubt and Julia & Julie, playing the
pregnant wife of Philip Seymour Hoffman and giving him a hand-job in his bathroom?
...about the same Amy Adams reading pornography directly to the
camera?
Many people will feel strongly one way or another about this
film. I only know when I saw one of the 80 year old parishioners from church
walking out of the film, I didn’t want to meet her eye.
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.
