It's not like Charlie Kaufman has written just great scripts in the past, with Human Nature and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, but I had hoped that, when directing his own script for the first time, he would be able to make the definitive Kaufmanesque artwork. Alas, maybe he needs the structure of another director to rein in his mad ideas. Or perhaps, like Human Nature and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Synecdoche, New York is just a misstep. It's not terrible or anything (and neither are his two other lesser films that I've already mentioned twice), but it just doesn't work. The movie involves a play director (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who gets a genius grant. Always having put on the plays of others, he now decides to write his own play, about his own, miserable life. Not just one part of his life, but his whole life, from birth to death, encompassing every daily event. Soon the play is about a director putting on a play about a director putting on a play. The idea is fascinating. Unfortunately, the execution is poor. Like Adaptation, Synecdoche comes from Charlie Kaufman's inner insecurities. This one is completely internal, and doesn't take place in any recognizable reality. There are bald symbols at every corner, like a house that is perpetually in flames. Kaufman rarely gives any real clues about these symbols, which leads to them being analyzed and then just dismissed as self-indulgence. Kaufman never gave me an in with the picture, so I just never cared about what was going on. And much of the time, Kaufman's sense of humor is lacking. Some of the more jokey material, like the arrogant, self-promoting psychologist played by Hope Davis, gets dropped as the film progresses, right about the time it's becoming pretty funny. I did start to like the movie better when it was dealing with the multi-layered universe Hoffman had put himself in. That mind-bending stuff is quite entertaining.
Review of Synecdoche, New York
