CHARLIE Kaufman, the screenwriting genius behind “Eternal Sun shine of the Spotless Mind,” doesn’t make it easy for himself – or the audience – with his directing debut, “Synecdoche, New York.”
This mind-blowing dark comedy stars a terrific Philip Seymour Hoffman as a playwright who constructs a massive theater piece that takes over his life – or maybe vice versa. It’s the first movie this year that demands at least two viewings to absorb its densely textured humor, which makes earlier Kaufman works such as “Adaptation” and “Being John Malkovich” look positively straightforward.
The title is both a term meaning a part that is used to refer to the whole, or vice versa, as well as a wordplay on the upstate city of Schenectady, where Caden Cotard (Hoffman) is staging an avant-garde production of “Death of a Salesman.”
Caden’s marriage to Adele (Catherine Keener), a painter of miniature portraits, is falling apart. She takes their young daughter with her to Berlin with a friend (a hilarious Jennifer Jason Leigh).
At the same time, Caden is forced to confront his own mortality as he begins suffering a long series of serious physical ailments and a mental breakdown not helped by a hostile psychotherapist (Hope Davis).
Caden is so obsessed with Adele that he ignores two women who are interested in him, a ticket-taker named Hazel (Samantha Morton) and Claire (Michelle Williams), an actress he eventually marries.
Death is Caden’s other great obsession. So when he wins a MacArthur “genius” grant, he decides to stage a massive theater work in a huge Manhattan warehouse containing a city-size set.
Decades pass as Claire, who has been cast as herself in the increasingly autobiographical work, divorces Caden; Hazel, who lives in a perpetually burning house, goes to work for Caden and finds Sammy (Tom Noonan), the actor playing Caden, more fun than the real thing.
Most confusingly, Caden tries to make Hazel jealous by reciprocating the attentions of the actress (Emily Watson) Sammy has hired to play Hazel.
Got that? I haven’t even come to the part about Caden’s now-grown daughter – whose lesbian lover is mom’s pal – becoming a performance artist with fatal tattoos. Or the actress (Dianne Wiest) hired to play Adele’s cleaning lady – actually Caden on the sly – who steps into the director’s shoes.
By this point, it’s impossible to separate Kaufman’s story from Caden’s masterwork. When apocalyptic events erupt on the streets, it isn’t clear whether they’re “real” or taking place outside another warehouse in the warehouse.
This version of Russian nesting dolls sounds rather grim, existential and more than a little pretentious. But the beauty of Kaufman’s production is that he’s mocking all these tendencies in art at the same time that he’s embracing those who take these chances.
“Synecdoche, New York” loses momentum toward the end, when Caden is a very old man. But it’s got more imagination than half a dozen movies combined; there’s nothing else out there like this, and to me that’s a very good thing.
NEW YORK
Hugely ambitious.
Running time: 124 minutes. Rated R (profanity, sex, nudity). At the Lincoln Plaza, the Empire, the Sunshine, the First and 62nd.