Synecdoche, New York Is A Very Nice Place To Be
Posted on Friday May 23, 2008, 16:55 by Damon Wise

Day nine and the festival is really winding down now. The market is about to close and most of the Hollywood execs have flown back to the US, leaving a substantially reduced level of industry chatter on the Croisette. Traditionally, Cannes is front-loaded with the higher-profile movies, which means that most people have gone home by the time the last few competition films unspool. Last year was the exception – Palme D'Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days screened early on, on just the second day – but quite often the winning film screens on the last weekend. Which is why we went into Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut Synecdoche, New York with mixed feelings. On the one hand, bad buzz from a recent trade screening made us wonder if the film was being deliberately buried at the end of the festival, while on the other hand, the jury's selections can come out of left-field and seldom square with the opinions of the world's press, who often miss the winner if they leave too early.

We needn't have worried. If the bad buzz is to be believed, there are two very good reasons, one is that the film is simply too out-there to strike it big with a mainstream audience, and the second is that any premature raves will affect the asking price. So we have a problem now; by raving to you about this beautiful, haunting and most likely enduring film, we're going to drive the price up for any UK distributor that wants to buy it. And the film is so very uncommercial, in its present, presumed finished state, that there'll be a lot of buyers arguing whether its awards, review and big DVD sales potential will justify what is sure to be a low short-term theatrical take.

And it's a toughie. For the first hour, the film is relatively easy to follow, as playwright Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is preparing for the premiere of his new stage presentation of Death Of A Salesman. His wife (Catherine Keener) is a successful artist in her own right, and Caden steadily endures a series of rebuffs and putdowns from her that finally result in her moving to Berlin with their four-year-old daughter, Olive. Caden throws himself into his work, obsessively cleaning their home and flirting with the theatre's box-office girl, and, after winning a huge grant from an arts bursary, sets about creating his life's work: a project that will tell the truth so honestly and objectively that it will literally be a chunk of Manhattan, rebuilt inside a huge theatre space.

At this point the film suddenly jumps its narrative tracks, although eagle-eyed viewers will spot from the outset that this has never been rooted in the real world. After a key line of dialogue from Hope Davis as Caden's therapist, Synechdoche becomes a stunning hallucination, trading on dreams, tropes, rhymes and reason before paring down to a mournful but emotionally charged climax as Caden makes a final, beatific peace with himself. What to say? Dealing as it does with the life of the mind, this is an artful blur of Barton Fink and Mulholland Drive, sharing a key plot point with the latter. With Hoffman in the lead it was never likely to go far wrong, but it's amazing to see how securely he anchors this film: even at its most obscure, Hoffman is just magnetic, taking us with him into Caden's artistic quest for purity.

There'll be lots of press about this film describing Kaufman's genius as a screenwriter, but this deft, ambitious and intellectually ravishing film is proof that he is just a fantastic writer full stop. The script is exquisite, not in terms of exposition and dialogue but in the way it uses language. A running theme is the way meaning can slip, through words that sound similar, which later becomes a visual motif. A good case in point is the film's title: Schenectady is the New York City where Caden and his family live, while its near-homonym, 'synecdoche', is a word to describe the practice of using part of something to describe its whole (using the word 'wheels' instead of 'car', for example). It's just a punt here, but we think that what Kaufman seems to be saying is that his film is about using one man's agony as a metaphor for all, and if you're looking for big issues, Kaufman tackles the big one head on.

To say much more would spoil it; suffice to say it's a funny, moving fever dream narrated by a tortured artist's id, ego and super-ego, with a terrific supporting cast who lift a potentially ponderous exercise right off the page. Whoever buys it might want to try putting THAT on the poster, but in a nutshell this is a must-see movie that will provoke and infuriate in equal measure...