Unsettling in Synecdoche, New York

In theaters Friday: Adventureland , Fast & Furious, Sugar [limited]

New on DVD and Blu-ray: Marley and Me, Seven Pounds, Slumdog Millionaire

Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is about nothing if it is not about failure. And as many critics either dismiss it or praise it as an exemplary entry into the “Life imitates art” canon of trope-like emotional pandering or a clever, life-enriching reminder that we’re all in this thing together, they’ve all got the film wrong. Because while Philip Seymour Hoffman’s ambitious playwright sets about constructing a massive and continual performance based on his own experiences and populated by actors portraying himself and those around him in an expansive warehouse fitted with a miniature version of Manhattan inside it, Kaufman’s film about Hoffman’s playwright is not about “Life imitates art” or “Art imitates Life,” but about how we all use life to imitate life.

Synecdoche is an obscure word meaning the whole of something is used to represent a part or, vice versa, a part is used to represent or stand-in for the whole. A common example is calling your car your “wheels.” In the film, Hoffman lets his play, a little version or piece of life, represent the whole of his existence.

Hoffman plays Caden Cotard—an overt reference to Cotard Syndrome which causes its sufferers to believe they are dying or already dead—who is given a prestigious and valuable arts grant, one that allows him to produce the play of a lifetime. And eventually, Cotard’s play becomes his lifetime. But, like I said, this movie is about failure and life imitating life. Unfortunately that theme is wrapped in a screenplay that is much better than the actual movie, one that can be easily appreciated, but not so easily liked. Be forewarned, many sequences are emotionally tyrannical if not hideously depressing.

First we see Cotard’s crumbling marriage to a painter of some renown played by a cold Catherine Keener and Cotard attending a series of doctor’s visits that result in increasingly dire diagnoses for his health. Soon Keener has taken their daughter to Berlin—she has an exhibition there—with her Bohemian gal pal played manipulative and creepy by Jennifer Jason Leigh—and what was supposed to be a month-long sabbatical turns into years of separation.

This moment of separation sheds some truly surreal light on Cotard’s life. His sense of time bends and lapses, he remarries and has another daughter but emotionally views his new family as actors, he reads the diary his first daughter left behind before going to Berlin and it includes new entries—provided to us in thick German accent—that couldn’t possibly be real, and he takes an interest in the ticket girl at his theatre who happens to live in a perpetually burning house in which Cotard and other visitors seem to treat the growing flames like nothing more than decorative candles. But the flames are more, they are a metaphor for dying, a sly declaration that death is waiting for us, even if we choose to ignore it.

Hoffman’s Cotard states the theme of the film to his cast and crew as they prepare to develop the play: “I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That’s what I want to explore. We’re all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we’re going to die, each of us secretly believing we won’t.”

Based on the plot, Kaufman comes off as a proponent of extensive self-examination—how could he not with Hoffman so clearly his mental doppelganger here– but also someone firmly against obsessing over oneself at the risk of ignoring others and the world around us. That is just one of the tragedies of the film. Indeed the world within Synecdoche, New York seems to be facing some kind of apocalypse. At one point Cotard mentions there being only 13 million people in the world. Other scenes, both real and reinacted for his play, show citizens being rounded up to be taken to “Funland” and streets littered with the dead. If this sounds depressing, it is.

The film stretches across at least 40 years of Cotard’s life. From the point he looses control of his family and daughter, through his desperate attempts to control his masterpiece play and his life, to his final decision to release control and take a small role in this play instead of the lead. By the end of it, Cotard is so tired and resigned to never finishing the play he lets a woman named Millicent—who had previously played the small role of Ellen, Katherine Keener’s cleaning lady who Cotard regularly pretended to be to gain access to her apartment—takeover his role as director.

And takeover she does, feeding Cotard and the rest of the cast and crew with stage directions and God-like voiceovers you’d never want to hear God say to you:

“What was once before you, an exciting mysterious future is now behind you; lived, understood, disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone’s experience, every single one—the specifics hardly matter. Everyone is everyone. You were Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You were Ellen; all her meager sadnesses are yours. All her gloominess. The gray, straw-like hair. Her red raw hands. It’s yours. It’s time for you to understand this.”

And so it goes in Kaufman’s screenplay that has so many layers, details and ideas the resulting film can’t help but fall short of it. From Being John Malkovich and Adapation to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Kaufman’s scripts have always been interested in the mechanics of memory, perception and time and other versions of the self. And in its overly ambitious way Synecdoche, New York builds on those themes but adds another: failure. Specifically, our collective failure to contemplate our own existence that will end in certain death, and how we project a version of ourselves in our lives, like an actor, to interact, use, love, lose and long for the projections we have crafted for other people. It’s about our failure to live life in a way that acknowledges certain things are out of our control. Cotard’s stool turns green and his daughter becomes a stripper who believes her mother’s horrible lies about him, and he can’t change any of it. He can only address it in his ever-expanding play. This is about life imitating life, and getting it terribly wrong.