A Lesson in Grammar and Love
Charlie Kaufman’s metafilm Synecdoche, New York takes on lessons about life, love, and death.By Ben Weyl
December 9, 2008
Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New YorkA synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part of something refers to the whole, or vice versa. Describing a new “set of wheels” to refer to a car, for example. Synecdoche (pronounced si-nek-duh-kee) also, helpfully, sounds like Schenectady, the city in the Empire State where Charlie Kaufman’s latest film, Synecdoche, New York, begins.
Fans of Kaufman’s work, topsy-turvy films like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind will find much to like in his newest film, which is also his directorial debut. The film has more than a few delicious impossibilities: a diary that continues to be filled though the author is thousands of miles away and a house continuously aflame that fails to burn to the ground. These dream-like sequences are accepted matter-of-factly by the characters. They have bigger fish to fry.
Indeed, this is a big film in scope, addressing themes like art and love and death. Yet the film’s message is quite simple: Face reality and find someone who makes you happy. Unfortunately for Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), this is a lesson that takes a lifetime to learn.
The film begins as the middle-aged Cotard wakes up to a public radio show discussing the coming of autumn in all its melancholic glory and it soon becomes clear that he has long been stuck in this saddest of seasons. Cotard directs Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman—that quintessential tale of failure—at a regional theater, and craves wider recognition for his artistic talents. His body is falling apart, or perhaps he is just a hypochondriac, and his wife Adele (Catherine Keener) leaves him early in the film, along with their young daughter, Olive, to make it in Berlin’s art world.
It seems Cotard’s luck has changed, however, when he discovers he has won a MacArthur Fellowship, dubbed the “genius grant.” He decides to go to Manhattan to stage his masterpiece, a play he says will be honest and real. What follows is a serious case of art imitating life or perhaps vice versa, as the play and Cotard’s life meld, with scenes overlapping to produce both hilarious and heart-wrenching consequences. All the while, Cotard adds supporting actors to the play, which of course is the story of his life, so that the cavernous warehouse in which they rehearse soon becomes a type of alternative universe. Cotard updates the old all-the-world’s-a-stage line. “None of those people is an extra,” he says of the multitudes that now populate his production. “They’re all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due.”
In many ways, Kaufman’s film is about art and the pursuit of truth through art, a lovely if impossible thing to achieve. Life, reality, is truth; art can only allude to the real McCoy. Here then is perhaps the synecdoche. Cotard’s characters, his plot, his whole play is only a part, a fragment of the truth.
For the longest time, Cotard ignores reality. He seems not to notice when his marriage to Adele peters out. To make his masterpiece, he shuts out the world around him, which increasingly begins to resemble a warzone for unexplained reasons. Worst of all, he is unwilling to honestly confront his feelings for the many women in his life, including the alluring Claire (Michelle Williams) and quirky Hazel (Samantha Morton).
Without exception, the acting in the film is superb. Hoffman, in particular, is enthralling, but Dianne Wiest deserves special mention for her subtlety and command in a small but important role. Wiest plays Millicent Weems, a stage actress who auditions for Ellen, Adele’s cleaning lady and eventually Cotard’s alter-ego. She later assumes the role of Cotard, and then, perhaps, God.
If this sounds like a strange movie, it is. But it is ultimately a truly enjoyable experience. It is a twisting tale that showcases Kaufman’s ambition and success at crafting a meta-narrative about life. At one point in the film, Sammy (Tom Noonan), who is now playing Cotard in Cotard’s play (because the act of putting on the play has now become part of the play), is giving notes to actors and says, “I’ve told you before, this is not a play about dating, it’s about death.” Cotard, walking behind Sammy, disagrees. “It is a play about dating,” he says. “It’s not just a play about death. It’s about everything: dating, earth, death, life, family, all that.”
In the end, Cotard does seem to find fulfillment. He finds joy with the woman he was probably meant to be with from the beginning, despite his persistent reluctance. He achieves, if not happiness, contentment. Not through artistic accomplishment but through the most basic of human needs—love. Sounds simple enough.
Ben Weyl is a legislative researcher at Congressional Quarterly. He graduated from Grinnell College in 2007.
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