Worlds within worlds within worlds, and there’s some nudity, too

Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York begins with the ring of an alarm clock and ends up somewhere far beyond imagination. This latest mindtrip from the writer of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of those indescribable films that transcends genre, one which is bound to leave most audience members dumbly scratching their heads long after the last interminable fadeout. This is a work of art about everything and nothing, about life and death and the pale imitations of lives and deaths in art, and the creative process that gradually consumes the lives of art’s creators. Finally, it’s about the poignancy of failure in spite of the highest ambitions, fitting because such poignancy describes the work itself. It’s a movie so ambitious, so well-acted and often so memorable that it’s a shame most of it is so insufferably unwatchable.Kaufman, the film’s writer and director, is what we may call an auteur, one of those very few Hollywood screenwriters whose body of work is more recognizable than those of most directors. His previous screenplays all balance on a superfine tightrope between banal reality and phantasmagoric surreality, and it’s to his credit that his prior films have mostly achieved a good deal of financial success without compromising their unabashed high-art aspirations. He is a rightly respected figure of both Hollywood and art-house cinema, partly because of his supernatural ability to imbue even the most cerebral art films with a strong emotional core – his characters may be surrounded by insanity, but they always remain recognizable human beings with whom we can readily identify. With the aid of like-minded visionary directors like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, Kaufman’s films have always stopped just short of crossing the line to pure incomprehensibility. With Synecdoche, the screenwriter’s directorial debut, he instead embraces the insanity in a vice-like death-grip and dives head-first over the line, dragging us willingly or not. We are left alone and untethered in an alien landscape.

The plot appears hilariously pedestrian, seemingly designed to hew as closely as possible to some unspoken indie drama formula – and completely one-up it. Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman, brilliantly meek) is dying, of what we don’t know, and his marriage with Adele (Catherine Keener at her coldest) is dissolving before their 4 year-old daughter Olive’s wide eyes. A regional theatre director in Schenectady, New York (probably the only word in the world that rhymes with “synecdoche”), Caden sits on the cusp of artistic breakthrough with his revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which he casts with untraditionally young actors. Although the revival is a hit, earning him a MacArthur “genius” grant that promises limitless artistic freedom, his life is otherwise adrift: a string of eccentric doctors can’t pinpoint the cause of his deteriorating health, and he is torn by the temptation of an obvious crush by box office girl Hazel (Samantha Morton) while his unsympathetic wife derides his artistic ambitions (and admits, during one of many hysterically funny marriage counseling sessions featuring Hope Davis as a self-assured but incompetent counselor, that she fantasized about her husband dying so she could “start over again”). His life, and the movie’s masquerade of realism, falls completely apart when Adele takes Olive to an art show featuring her miniscule paintings in Berlin, leaving Caden behind indefinitely.

A lot is going on here in these increasingly heartrending episodes of ordinary family life, and that’s even before Caden takes out a lease on an impossibly massive Manhattan warehouse to produce a play of absurd dimensions – replicating life itself with such detail that the world he builds inside this warehouse slowly becomes as monumental, complex and confusing as the world it’s modeled after. Walking through the warehouse with his binder-toting assistant in tow, he barks instructions to thousands of actors in roles so lifelike they might as well be playing themselves. His antlike construction crew builds amazingly realistic replicas of New York’s streets, crafting a skyline indiscernible from the real thing but for the domed glass-and-steel ceiling looming above it all. Eventually Caden, searching vainly for the magical thing that will allow him to fully express himself in his art, becomes so obsessed with reproducing life in all its detail that he has actors playing the actors in his play, miming their actions alongside them. Inside the warehouse he builds another warehouse, which contains another replica of the world outside, a seemingly infinite recursion that brings to mind the cover art to Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma. Time twists and stretches and snaps back like a thick rubber band, with some characters aging suddenly while others remain young, and diaries describing events that could not have happened before the entries were written. Caden’s life grows increasingly hectic, depressing and confused.

All the while, Kaufman piles on visual detritus: zeppelins lumbering over Caden’s urban simulacrum, wrecked bodies scattered askew in a post-apocalyptic version of the city, menacing graffiti art and tattoos that wilt with the owner’s dying body, tiny painted canvases smaller than their commentary cards that require magnifying glasses to view, chaos-strewn versions of real-life New York City and Berlin, the gratuitous full-frontal nudity of Tammy (Emily Watson), and a great deal more imagery whose primary purpose is perhaps to confuse or unsettle us. Synecdoche is a Schoenbergian cacophony of discordant melodies, an inexorable crescendo toward madness without hope of meaning.

Every now and then these tones resolve into beautiful harmony. Kaufman’s withholding of the distinction between reality and imagination is at times ingenious: we suspect early the nature of Caden’s sickness, for example, but it’s never revealed explicitly. And the real emotional notes running beneath the film’s surreal exercises also hit a deep chord. Caden’s sincere desire to create a Big Work that will say something personal yet powerfully universal is something any artist can identify with, and the delicate longing between Caden and the women in his life – Adele, Claire, Tammy and especially Hazel – is almost painfully moving.

But always, these emotional buoys are just out of reach, obscured by distractions. Why is the house perpetually on fire, we are suddenly forced to ask, and Kaufman takes care not to answer, instead chuckling from behind the wizard’s curtain at the cleverness of his own scattershot Dadaism. He drops hints and misleading details to throw us off the trail, challenging us to conquer this maze of a film, but the solution is too frustrating for all but the most dedicated Kaufmanites to grasp. Unlike his past labyrinths, this one is no fun at all.

What is the purpose of all this dizzying – and dare I say, pretentious – psychedelia? “None of these people is an extra,” Caden bellows several times, touching upon some universal human manifesto but never quite owning it. “They’re all leads with their own stories – they deserve to be given their due!” Is the purpose of this movie to bore into the souls of the artists within each of us, to make us truly feel what it’s like to be Charlie Kaufman throwing himself into his art? If this is what great art feels like, then I am glad to be playing the role of critic and not creator.