synecdoche new york movie review

We strut and fret our hour upon the stage, and then are heard no more

Philip Seymour Hoffman cleans his place in "Synecdoche, New York."

I think you have to see Charlie Kaufman ‘s “Synecdoche, New York” twice. I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film and that I had not mastered it. The second time because I needed to. The third time because I will want to. It will open to confused audiences and live indefinitely. A lot of people these days don’t even go to a movie once. There are alternatives. It doesn’t have to be the movies, but we must somehow dream. If we don’t “go to the movies” in any form, our minds wither and sicken.

This is a film with the richness of great fiction. Like Suttree, the Cormac McCarthy novel I’m always mentioning, it’s not that you have to return to understand it. It’s that you have to return to realize how fine it really is. The surface may daunt you. The depths enfold you. The whole reveals itself, and then you may return to it like a talisman.

Wow, is that ever not a “money review.” Why will people hurry along to what they expect to be trash, when they’re afraid of a film they think may be good? The subject of “Synecdoche, New York” is nothing less than human life and how it works. Using a neurotic theater director from upstate New York, it encompasses every life and how it copes and fails. Think about it a little and, my god, it’s about you. Whoever you are.

Here is how life is supposed to work. We come out of ourselves and unfold into the world. We try to realize our desires. We fold back into ourselves, and then we die. “Synecdoche, New York” follows a life that ages from about 40 to 80 on that scale. Caden Cotard ( Philip Seymour Hoffman ) is a theater director, with all of the hangups and self-pity, all the grandiosity and sniffles, all the arrogance and fear, typical of his job. In other words, he could be me. He could be you. The job, the name, the race, the gender, the environment, all change. The human remains pretty much the same.

Here is how it happens. We find something we want to do, if we are lucky, or something we need to do, if we are like most people. We use it as a way to obtain food, shelter, clothing, mates, comfort, a first folio of Shakespeare, model airplanes, American Girl dolls, a handful of rice, sex, solitude, a trip to Venice, Nikes, drinking water, plastic surgery, child care, dogs, medicine, education, cars, spiritual solace — whatever we think we need. To do this, we enact the role we call “me,” trying to brand ourselves as a person who can and should obtain these things.

In the process, we place the people in our lives into compartments and define how they should behave to our advantage. Because we cannot force them to follow our desires, we deal with projections of them created in our minds. But they will be contrary and have wills of their own. Eventually new projections of us are dealing with new projections of them. Sometimes versions of ourselves disagree. We succumb to temptation — but, oh, father, what else was I gonna do? I feel like hell. I repent. I’ll do it again.

Hold that trajectory in mind and let it interact with age, discouragement, greater wisdom and more uncertainty. You will understand what “Synecdoche, New York” is trying to say about the life of Caden Cotard and the lives in his lives. Charlie Kaufman is one of the few truly important writers to make screenplays his medium. David Mamet is another. That is not the same as a great writer (Faulkner, Pinter, Cocteau) who writes screenplays. Kaufman is writing in the upper reaches with Bergman. Now for the first time he directs.

It is obvious that he has only one subject, the mind, and only one plot, how the mind negotiates with reality, fantasy, hallucination, desire and dreams. “ Being John Malkovich .” “ Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind .” “ Adaptation .” “ Human Nature .” “ Confessions of a Dangerous Mind .” What else are they about? He is working in plain view. In one film, people go inside the head of John Malkovich . In another, a writer has a twin who does what he cannot do. In another, a game show host is, or thinks he is, an international spy. In “Human Nature,” a man whose childhood was shaped by domineering parents trains white mice to sit down at a tiny table and always employ the right silverware. Is behavior learned or enforced?

“Synecdoche, New York” is not a film about the theater, although it looks like one. A theater director is an ideal character for representing the role Kaufman thinks we all play. The magnificent sets, which stack independent rooms on top of one another, are the compartments we assign to our life’s enterprises. The actors are the people in roles we cast from our point of view. Some of them play doubles assigned to do what there’s not world enough and time for. They have a way of acting independently, in violation of instructions. They try to control their own projections. Meanwhile, the source of all this activity grows older and tired, sick and despairing. Is this real or a dream? The world is but a stage, and we are mere actors upon it. It’s all a play. The play is real.

This has not been a conventional review. There is no need to name the characters, name the actors, assign adjectives to their acting. Look at who is in this cast. You know what I think of them. This film must not have seemed strange to them. It’s what they do all day, especially waiting around for the director to make up his mind.

What does the title mean? It means it’s the title. Get over it.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

Samantha Morton as Hazel
Hope Davis as Madeleine
Emily Watson as Tammy
Michelle Williams as Claire
Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden
Catherine Keener as Adele
Jennifer Jason Leigh as Maria

Written and directed by

Charlie Kaufman

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Synecdoche, New York Reviews

Synecdoche, New York aches with sentiments on a life (and indeed all life) not fully lived and overly focused on analysis and reflection, offering rich commentary on remorse and alienation.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 5, 2023

This takes the notion of life as merely one sprawling play and literalizes it.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 15, 2023

Episode 43: The New World / Synecdoche, New York / L'Avventura

Full Review | Original Score: 96/100 | Oct 4, 2021

Kaufman touches upon universal theme of loneliness and melancholy through the eyes of an obsessive artist who builds a replica of life on stage within the replica, within the replica, within the replica... with depth and intimacy.

Full Review | Mar 24, 2021

Unveils many interesting ideas, but the purpose of the film is so rooted amongst ambitious creative chaos that few will understand - or care about - its intentions.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Nov 28, 2020

If you engage with the movie on its own terms then even its oddest, most surreal conceits - such as the home that is permanently on fire - make a weird kind of sense.

Full Review | Nov 22, 2020

Synecdoche, New York is for those who are true cineastes, connoisseurs of cinema who seek more than easy answers, paint-by-number plots and happy endings.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 24, 2020

Insufferable auteurist navel-gazing, its "postmodernism" all empty gimmickry to hide an utterly hollow center...

Full Review | Sep 15, 2020

The film goes on too long, but... needs to be seen twice for all the pieces to click.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 10, 2020

[W]ith Synecdoche, New York Charlie Kaufman has most certainly turned in one of the most beautifully realised, exquisitely made films of the year. Simply put, it's astonishing.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 31, 2019

Kaufman's absurdly comic, achingly melancholy vision manages to be as universal and as all encompassing as the masterpiece that Caden can never finish.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 6, 2019

The film very carefully sets up several interesting ideas, but then drops them as too many conflicting ideas become impossible to juggle.

Full Review | Aug 7, 2018

As an example of failure, and delusion, it's fascinating but ultimately frustrating.

Full Review | Dec 30, 2017

Even amid the complexity of his vision, there are moments of searing simplicity and emotional speechlessness that even the most hardened loner among us cannot fail to take to heart.

Full Review | Aug 8, 2017

The movie is ungainly, but to appreciate it one has to swallow the whole purple pill. As inconsistent as it is, it's still more album than mix tape.

Full Review | May 16, 2016

Brilliantly imagined and perfectly performed, Synecdoche, New York is so heartbroken and strange that it can be compared only to other Charlie Kaufman films.

Full Review | Mar 6, 2015

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 17, 2011

An important and intriguing film that must be seen to be believed.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 24, 2011

The power and tragedy of the love story, or hell, the life story of Caden Cotard will become a part of you, because it is your story, and his story is yours, and back and forth and so on and on because 'everyone's everyone'.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 27, 2010

Art is a dream through which some seek to rise above the mundane. "Synecdoche" is the nightmare of succumbing further to the mundane via art. What could be inaccessible is instead gloriously indispensable - a confounding & combative, but great, film.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 20, 2010

The Movie Review: 'Synecdoche, New York'

"Regardless of how this whole thing works out, I will be dying, and so will you, and so will everyone else here. And that's what I'd like to explore." These are the opening instructions that theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) offers a newly assembled cast in Charlie Kaufman's film Synecdoche, New York . But they might just as easily serve as a warning to prospective moviegoers.

Fans of the film (and I am one) will praise its immense ambition and originality; critics, for their part, will declare it to be glum and narcissistic. As is not infrequent in such cases, both are correct. Synecdoche, New York is a huge film about puny sentiments, an anti-heroic epic of failure, remorse, alienation, and self-pity. It may not be the best film of the year, but it is very likely to be the most extraordinary.

Like past Kaufman scripts ( Being John Malkovich , Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ), this one begins in mundane enough fashion, as Caden awakes with wife Adele (Catherine Keener) and preschool daughter Olive in his modest home in Schenectady, New York. (The movie's title, like Adaptation before it, is a pun, drawing on both the name of the town and the literary device of synecdoche, in which a part is made to stand in for the whole.) The household is quickly beset by signs of decay: a public-radio interviewee who explains that writers are drawn to autumn because "it's the beginning of the end"; a magazine cover entitled "Attending to Your Illness"; the discovery that Olive's poop is inexplicably green (this is the first of many ill-colored emissions). The first notable event in the film is a plumbing calamity: As Caden shaves at the bathroom sink, the faucet jerks like a cut snake before exploding; his resulting head wound requires a trip to the emergency room. It is, as Caden guesses, "just the start of something awful."

As Caden's health deteriorates in odd and sometimes gruesome ways, Adele--a painter of canvases so tiny that they are shipped in crates the size of matchboxes--takes Olive away with her to Berlin for a gallery show of indeterminate length. Caden's center cannot hold: Spoken language fails (characters trade confusions over homonyms like "stool" and "pipe"), and time itself seems to distend. When Hazel (Samantha Morton), the sweet, romantically forward ticket girl at Caden's theater, points out that "it's been a year" since Adele abandoned him, Caden replies as if she's nuts: "It's been a week ." But though we've been conditioned to take his side in the temporal dispute, she is in fact correct.

After winning a MacArthur genius grant (how, it is difficult to imagine), Caden begins the production of a theatrical event in an abandoned New York warehouse, a vast simulacrum of the outside world for which actors must be found to play the actors playing the characters in infinite regression. A stalker (Tom Noonan) who has followed Caden for decades becomes his on-set double; an actress hired to play Hazel (Emily Watson) replaces her offstage as well by letting Caden take her to bed; another (Dianne Wiest) arrives to play a part that Caden had stumbled into in real life (that of ex-wife Adele's cleaning woman), only to replace him altogether as art gradually usurps reality.

The subject of Kaufman's best work, Eternal Sunshine , was the gradual erasure of a man's memory. Here, the subject is the erasure of the man himself, the way his roles--husband, father, lover, director--are one by one shed, stolen, half-forgotten. As Caden's stalker informs him at one point, "I want to follow you and see how you lose even more of yourself." These are the windmills of Kaufman's mind and, like God's, they grind slow but exceedingly fine.

The first film Kaufman directed as well as wrote, Synecdoche shares the hazy, dreamlike quality that has characterized much of his work. For all its cleverness, the pieces don't fit too neatly. Some of the themes are readily apparent--the intertwining of sex and death, which almost always accompany one another in the film--but others remain obscure, such as Hazel's purchase and long residence in a house that is perpetually on fire. The result is a film that is less philosophical, or even psychological, than neurological in impact. It doesn't make an argument, it evokes a mood, a broad sensation of regret and exhaustion. The world it conjures is one in which important truths remain hidden or misunderstood.

The large cast, which also includes Michelle Williams as Caden's second wife and Hope Davis as a predatory psychologist, is uniformly excellent, if generally operating in a minor key. Even Hoffman, who appears in nearly every scene, is uncharacteristically recessive, and while this is clearly intentional, it is not always terribly satisfying. There are no Big Performances on display here. From its first frames, this is Kaufman's baby, and while some viewers may find it unlovable, it is moving in odd and unexpected ways.

It is, moreover, a work of such scope and imagination that it makes the fall's other releases to date feel small and half-hearted, easy illusions that might be playing on a movie screen somewhere within Caden's vast set. Seldom does one run across a work of art so strange and original and yet so comprehensive, an invented universe so fully realized that emerging from the theater at its conclusion can be a dislocating experience. Though barely two hours long, the film feels longer--and not, for once, in a bad way. It is an immersive experience, far too much movie to be fully digested in a single sitting or, in my case, even two. And, yes, that may be taken as a compliment, a complaint, or both.

About the Author

Dreamer, Live in the Here and Now

By Manohla Dargis

Oct. 23, 2008

To say that Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now. That at least would be an appropriate response to a film about failure, about the struggle to make your mark in a world filled with people who are more gifted, beautiful, glamorous and desirable than the rest of us we who are crippled by narcissistic inadequacy, yes, of course, but also by real horror, by zits, flab and the cancer that we know (we know!) is eating away at us and leaving us no choice but to lie down and die.

Yet since this is a review of a new Charlie Kaufman work, perhaps I should hit rewind: “Synecdoche, New York” is the first film directed by the writer of such unlikely Hollywood entertainments as “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” a romance of such delicate feeling that it’s still a shock that it carries a studio brand. Mr. Kaufman’s kinked, playful screenplays are usually accompanied by a flurry of “e” adjectives: eclectic, eccentric, edgy, eggheady. (Also: quirky.) That’s true only if you consider the contemporary American screen, with its talking Chihuahuas and adult male babies with mother fixations. Come to think of it, the main character in “Synecdoche” has a thing about poop and bosomy women, though happily not at the same time.

To continue, despite my agonizing self-consciousness: “Synecdoche” is the story of a theater director, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman, exhaling despair with every breath), miserably married to a talented painter, Adele Lack (Catherine Keener). The two live in Schenectady, N.Y., with their 4-year-old, Olive (Sadie Goldstein), who, when the story opens, is casually evacuating radioactive-green feces. Neither Caden nor Adele is alarmed, so intensely are they wrapped up in a depressive melancholia they seem to have nurtured longer than their daughter. Even couples therapy (with Hope Davis, in a dazzling brief turn) brings out the worst in them. “Can I say something awful?,” Adele asks (as if she needed permission), before confessing that she fantasized Caden dying. Which made her happy.

Caden lives with Adele and Olive in a “fragile-seeming home,” which is true even if those particular words were written by Arthur Miller, who uses them to describe Willy Loman’s home. As it happens, Caden is directing “Death of a Salesman,” but with a twist: the actors (including Michelle Williams), are all young. The tragedy of the play, explains Caden, will emerge from the casting: the audience will see the young actors and know that, in time, they will end up every bit as crushed as Willy. In “Salesman,” Miller writes that an air of the dream clings to Willy’s home, “a dream rising out of reality.” Mr. Kaufman doesn’t directly quote these words, yet they hover over the film nonetheless.

“Salesman” is a smash, but everything else falls to smithereens. Adele, who smirks through the play and asks Caden why he’s wasting himself on other people’s work, takes Olive to Berlin for a show that will make the painter a star. Caden stays behind, worrying the sores that have sprouted on his body and watching a pharmaceutical commercial in which he appears to play a part. Is he delusional? Dreaming? Before you have time to reach for Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams,” he wins a MacArthur Award, a so-called genius grant, and begins work on a monumental theater production. I want, he tells his therapist with baleful sincerity, to create something “big and true and tough. You know, finally put my real self into something.”

He succeeds in doing the first (the big, the true, the tough); it’s the self part that proves trickier. Among many, many other things, “Synecdoche, New York” is about authenticity, including the search for an authentic self in an inauthentic world. For Caden, creating something that will justify the genius award, which will quiet Adele’s mocking criticism and his own restless doubt, becomes all-consuming. Inside a fantastically, impossibly enormous warehouse, he begins rehearsing with dozens and then hundreds, thousands, of actors, directing them in separate lifelike vignettes. Ms. Williams’s Claire, the adoring young woman who earlier played Willy Loman’s wife, joins the new cast and soon marries Caden, Adele having abandoned that role. (“I’m famous!” Adele blurts out to Caden on the phone from Berlin before hanging up.)

There’s more including Samantha Morton as Hazel, Caden’s sweetest of sweethearts so much more that you would need to recreate the film in its entirety to get it all in, which is precisely Caden’s own tactic. Inside the warehouse, he builds a replica of his world line by line, actor by actor, until fiction and nonfiction blur. Like the full-scale map in Borges’s short story “On Exactitude in Science,” the representation takes on the dimensions of reality to the point of replacing it. The French theorist Jean Baudrillard uses Borges’s story as a metaphor for his notion of the simulacrum, which probably explains why Caden, who has trouble naming things, considers titling his production “Simulacrum.” I don’t even know what that means, sighs Hazel.

You may giggle knowingly at that line, but the poignancy of this exchange is that Caden, who is so busy creating one world that he forgets to live in another, doesn’t seem to really understand what it means either. Mr. Kaufman rarely stops to explain himself, but like that simulacrum aside, he continually hints at what he’s up to, where he’s going and why. (Even Caden’s last name is a clue as to what ails him.) Mr. Kaufman is serious about seriousness, but he’s also serious about being funny, so he drops heavy weight (Kafka, Dostoyevsky) lightly, at times comically, and keeps the jokes, wordplay and sight gags coming amid the on- and offstage dramas, divorces, births, calamities, the fear and the sickness and the trembling.

Despite its slippery way with time and space and narrative and Mr. Kaufman’s controlled grasp of the medium, “Synecdoche, New York” is as much a cry from the heart as it is an assertion of creative consciousness. It’s extravagantly conceptual but also tethered to the here and now, which is why, for all its flights of fancy, worlds within worlds and agonies upon agonies, it comes down hard for living in the world with real, breathing, embracing bodies pressed against other bodies. To be here now, alive in the world as it is rather than as we imagine it to be, seems a terribly simple idea, yet it’s also the only idea worth the fuss, the anxiety of influence and all the messy rest, a lesson hard won for Caden. Life is a dream, but only for sleepers.

“Synecdoche, New York” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for grown-up words and female nudity.

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman; director of photography, Frederick Elmes; edited by Robert Frazen; music by Jon Brion; production designer, Mark Friedberg; produced by Anthony Bregman, Mr. Kaufman, Spike Jonze and Sidney Kimmel; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes.

WITH: Philip Seymour Hoffman (Caden Cotard), Samantha Morton (Hazel), Michelle Williams (Claire Keen), Catherine Keener (Adele Lack), Emily Watson (Tammy), Dianne Wiest (Ellen Bascomb/Millicent Weems), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Maria), Hope Davis (Madeleine Gravis), Sadie Goldstein (Olive, 4 years old) and Tom Noonan (Sammy Barnathan).

A listing of credits on Friday with a film review of “Synecdoche, New York,” misspelled the given name of the composer of the music. He is Jon Brion, not John.

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Synecdoche, New York (2008)

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Synecdoche, New York Review

15 May 2009

124 minutes

Synecdoche, New York

Scriptwriters have their obsessions. For Billy Wilder it was the mercenary heart of the American Dream; with John Milius it was something as naggingly perfect as John Ford’s Western, The Searchers. For Charlie Kaufman, it’s always been the knotty perplexity of the human brain. Yet while we’ve travelled from such magical places as the inside of John Malkovich’s head in his 1999 screenwriting debut, Being John Malkovich, to the crumbling beach house at the heart of Jim Carrey’s romantic memories in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Kaufman’s scripts have always begun in frosty grey worlds inhabited by frizz-haired outcasts.

In the past, Kaufman’s director/collaborators Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry have tempered this gloom with larger-than-life performances (Malkovich, Adaptation), or a comic-book zaniness (Human Nature, Eternal Sunshine). With Kaufman at the controls, reality is grittier than ever: Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman) lives in a cramped apartment with an unhappy artist wife Adele (Catherine Keener) and their four year-old daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein). Even the film stock looks grainy and deep-pored. The dream-logic of previous scripts is also more overt. Events are filtered through Caden’s rheumy worldview, where cartoons of himself feature in pharmaceutical ads on TV, and, poisoned by Adele’s artistic ambitions, both he and Olive appear to be excreting paint, their bodies decaying from the start. It’s here that you can see SNY’s roots as a horror movie project, focusing on fears of illness and death. What saves these scenes from excessive gloom is Kaufman’s desire to locate his characters in the real, rather than the comic.

When Adele leaves Caden and takes their daughter to start a new life in Berlin, Caden hooks up with the cat-like Hazel (Samantha Morton), who works in his theatre’s box office. Their relationship is flawed and frustrating, but the chemistry between the two actors is a fizzing delight which the film revels in.

This idea that we’re seeing the beauty of life that Caden is missing is brought home when he’s awarded his Genius Grant and is shown his gargantuan Manhattan work space. His only idea is an epic play about his own life — something “big, true and tough. You know, finally put my real self into something”, with actors playing his daughter, ex-wife, Hazel and himself. A grandiose attempt to make his wife notice him, Caden’s play may also signify our own desire to order the chaos of the everyday, or simply Kaufman’s inability to finish his script. But as it grows — with Caden enlisting thousands of actors and building life-size New York sets — so does the film’s richness, spinning off into a looking-glass world of magical revelations and surreal dead ends, where characters buy burning houses, become doppelgängers of each other and start dating the fake versions of themselves. By the end, it’s hard to tell whether we’re in the maze of Caden’s mind or observing real life, but what cuts through is the humanity on show. Caden’s moment of enlightenment may come too late but, for us, the experience is close to overpowering.

Movies | 06 08 2020

Movies | 17 12 2010

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Movies | 29 05 2008

Highbrow Anxiety

There’s something appealingly anti-psychological about Charlie Kaufman. As a Jew who explores the inner lives of anxious neurotic depressive solipsists, he could be expected to build his works around repressed traumas and cathartic revelations: very Freudian, very twentieth century. But Kaufman goes in the opposite direction. The whirlpool doesn’t circle in on painful personal truths—it moves outward, in ever-widening spirals, until identity is swallowed up by larger forces. In Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) studied an actor playing another version of Charlie Kaufman (Jon Cusack) while a Charlie Kaufman twin (also Nicolas Cage) lived out a contrapuntal, ante–Charlie Kaufman life—whereupon all the Charlies and Charlie creations were sucked into the maw of the movie-within-a-movie’s Hollywood story structure. Now, in Synecdoche, New York, his madly overambitious directorial debut, Kaufman contrives to display even more permutations of the self, on the way to the self’s dissolution. This epic dream play with its leaps through time and space, its characters and shadow characters, poses a momentous question: Uh … well … I’m not sure what question the movie is posing. The answer, though, is definitely “Death.”

The protagonist of Synecdoche, New York is Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a regional-theater director in a failing body and a failing marriage who is putting the final touches on a production of Death of a Salesman . The film’s first act is deft—realistic, but with little absurdist bumps that both goose you and give you goose bumps. The plumbing in Caden’s old house explodes and there’s blood in his pee and the set of his production is collapsing: decay, decay, decay. His painter wife (Catherine Keener) decamps for a show in Berlin with their 4-year-old daughter, Olive, which is when things begin to get extra-strange—when we leave the kind of drama embodied by Arthur Miller way behind. Groggy, morose, experiencing seizures and breaking out in pustules, Caden allows himself to be seduced by the dizzy redhead, Hazel (Samantha Morton), who lives in a house that is perpetually on fire; and then takes up with his needy blonde leading lady, Claire (Michelle Williams). The time frame blurs. Why can’t he get through to his wife in Berlin? Has she been gone a week? A year? Is that Olive in a German magazine covered in tattoos? This isn’t another movie in which the protagonist is dead and doesn’t know it???

The best thing to do with one’s spatial-temporal bewilderment is get over it and go with the free-associational flow: Synecdoche, New York cannot be diagrammed. It takes place near Schenectady and it is a synecdoche—a stand-in for something else that can be a stand-in for it. At some point, Caden wins a MacArthur “Genius” grant and decides to mount a semi-improvised dramatic epic in a vast moldering warehouse that will illuminate his own life. He has been trailed by a mysterious doppelgänger (Tom Noonan); now that man assumes Caden’s role, and becomes the director. Circles intersect: Hazel takes up with Caden No. 2 while Caden consoles himself with the younger, dishier Hazel No. 2 (Emily Watson). Caden’s jowls deepen; his hair turns white and falls out. People die. The man who has always been alone is even more alone. Slowly, he lets go of his notions of cause and effect, his identity, his specialness. Very slowly. Very, very slowly.

I died a little myself in the last half-hour of Synecdoche, New York, when the movie turned into a tone poem, an interminable threnody for a life barely lived. Part of the problem is that Kaufman doesn’t establish his director’s voice: He doesn’t vary the rhythm of his shots, and his camera watches neutrally as actors intone his increasingly portentous lines. There’s a hint of self-satire in the way that Caden overcomplicates things, but Kaufman seems to have acquired Woody Allen’s suspiciousness of comedy, and Hoffman is so dedicated to his character’s mopiness that he sucks the air out of the frame. It’s a bummer when your hero seems born to succumb.

On the plus side, Jon Brion contributes a four-note motif that conjures up a vivid sense of loss. A few of the actors come through. Keener’s bedraggled world-weariness is like a haiku, and Michelle Williams has a lyrical simplicity. A scene in which Caden meets his grown-up, ill daughter has a breathtaking visual effect: One of her leaf tattoos shrivels and falls off. It’s heartbreaking how rich this failed project is, with enough poetry for several great movies, but not enough push for one.

Oliver Stone’s W. is a bloodless puppet show, but give Stone points for attempting to burrow into the boy-king’s head. As in his biopics of Nixon and Alexander the Great, he comes not to mock his subject but to dramatize the nexus of great power and personality. The slant is Oedipal: Bush’s downfall, pegged to Iraq, is rooted in the tension with his dad. The movie begins with his declaration to do what his father didn’t—finish off Saddam—then leaps back in time to show W. (Josh Brolin) being sprung from jail by his father (James Cromwell) after a drunken frat-house binge. “Poppy” Bush calls “Junior” a disappointment and draws unfavorable comparisons with his younger brother, Jeb. Junior will show the old man, even if it means letting Cheney and Rumsfeld off their leashes.

By (low) biopic standards, this is a promising plan of attack. What’s dismaying is the lameness of the execution. W. receives the news in a Cabinet meeting that there are no WMDs in Iraq, listens to Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn) and Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) sputter excuses, and says: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me … You can’t get fooled again.” This is, of course, a legendary “Bushism,” but it was blithered at a press conference when Bush had his usual trouble reciting his folksy talking points. Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser don’t seem to know the difference between public and private discourse. There’s no racy, idiomatic dialogue here—no scenes with an independent life. The whole movie is talking points.

Brolin at least holds the screen. Early on, his W. is pure appetite, cramming food into his mouth and swilling beer. Suddenly sober, he’s a man reeling in search of a self. But I don’t buy his fundamental earnestness. Stone’s W. isn’t the smirking liar who never, as Norman Mailer said, felt a twinge of doubt about his qualifications to be president. He’s in over his head, but he means well.

W. isn’t gripping enough as drama or witty enough as satire. It’s neutered. Did Stone want to change his rabble-rouser image and show his critics he has become more responsible? (He has his own daddy issues.) Big mistake! His greatest asset—and I say this as someone whose least favorite film is Natural Born Killers —is a lusty, blowhard showmanship. In the midst of the turmoil that George W. Bush has wrought, Stone has delivered his most tepid film.

Clint Eastwood’s Changeling is based on the true story of Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), a single mother whose young son disappeared in 1928 and was returned six months later—at least, the Los Angeles Police Department said it was her son. She didn’t recognize him, which irritated the patriarchal and corrupt police captain so much he threw her into a mental hospital. It would be a horrific story even if underplayed, but Eastwood shoots it like a horror movie. The false boy is lit to resemble the Antichrist Damien in The Omen, while in the psychiatric ward, whey-faced loons press their heads against the bars and shriek, ugly nurses leer, and the creepy doctor plots to throw Angie on a gurney and give her jolts of electricity. The ham-handed script by J. Michael Straczynski rearranges events so that the motives of the police captain (Jeffrey Donovan) are unfathomable—he must want Damien to grow up and bring forth Armageddon. The way Eastwood shoves Jolie’s suffering in our face is like a threat to the Academy: “And the Oscar will go to … ” She’s a great actress. She doesn’t need his domineering chivalry.

BACKSTORY Born in California in 1930, Clint Eastwood seems like the obvious pick to direct Changeling, given its setting in Depression-era Los Angeles, but the film’s original director was Ron Howard , who dropped out to direct Frost/Nixon . A father of seven kids, Eastwood told USA Today that he sees Changeling as “a horror film … the worst nightmare an adult could have.” And Angelina Jolie, the world’s most famous mother of six, told Entertainment Weekly, “When Brad [Pitt] saw Changeling, he said he could see my mother … So decent and sweet, but when it came to protecting her children, she somehow found this odd strength.’’

Synecdoche, New York Directed by Charlie Kaufman. Sony Pictures Classics. R. W. Directed by Oliver Stone. Lionsgate. PG-13. Changeling Directed by Clint Eastwood. Universal Pictures. R. E-mail: [email protected] .

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Synecdoche, New York movie review (2008)
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COMMENTS

Synecdoche, New York movie review (2008) | Roger Ebert
The subject of "Synecdoche, New York" is nothing less than human life and how it works. Using a neurotic theater director from upstate New York, it encompasses every life and how it copes and fails. Think about it a little and, my god, it's about you.
Synecdoche, New York | Rotten Tomatoes
Caden leaves his home in Schenectady, N.Y., and heads to New York City, where he gathers a cast of actors and tells them to live their lives within the constructs of a mock-up of the city.
Synecdoche, New York - Movie Reviews | Rotten Tomatoes
Synecdoche, New York is for those who are true cineastes, connoisseurs of cinema who seek more than easy answers, paint-by-number plots and happy endings. Full Review | Original Score:...
The Movie Review: 'Synecdoche, New York' - The Atlantic
Synecdoche, New York is a huge film about puny sentiments, an anti-heroic epic of failure, remorse, alienation, and self-pity. It may not be the best film of the year, but it is very likely...
Synecdoche, New York - Wikipedia
The story and themes of Synecdoche, New York polarized critics: some called it pretentious or self-indulgent, but others declared it a masterpiece, with Roger Ebert ranking it as the decade's best. [7]
Dreamer, Live in the Here and Now - The New York Times
“Synecdoche, New York” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for grown-up words and female nudity. SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK Opens on Friday in New York and Los...
Synecdoche, New York (2008) - IMDb
'Synecdoche, New York' Synopsis: A theatre director struggles with his work, and the women in his life, as he creates a life-size replica of New York City inside a warehouse as part of his new play. 'Synecdoche, New York', written & directed by the magnificent Charlie Kaufman, is tale of life.
Synecdoche, New York Review | Movie - Empire
Synecdoche, New York Review. After winning a MacArthur Genius Grant, theatre director Caden Cotard (Hoffman) relocates to a giant New York warehouse where he buries himself in a theatrical...
Synecdoche, New York - W. - Changeling -- New York Magazine ...
The answer, though, is definitely “Death.” The protagonist of Synecdoche, New York is Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a regional-theater director in a failing body and a failing marriage...
Synecdoche, New York critic reviews - Metacritic
11 (32%) negative. 2 (6%) Showing 34 Critic Reviews. 100. The New York Times. To say that Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now. Read More. By Manohla Dargis FULL REVIEW. 100.