The Best Film of 2008? Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York

Synecdoche, New York, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, was greeted with Best Film of the Year from critics and catcalls from moviegoers. It is a film that only someone like Psychiatric Times’ Editor in Chief, Dr Ron Pies, could fully understand (ie, a psychiatrist who knows about arcane neuroscience and literature). The problems start with the title. Most people have no idea what “synecdoche” means or how to pronounce it. Looking it up is not much help. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a figure [of speech] by which a comprehensive term is used for a less comprehensive or vice versa, as whole for part or part for whole, genus for species or species for genus, etc.” The commentary adds to the confusion: “Formerly sometimes used loosely or vaguely, and not infrequently misexplained.” No matter. Most critics did not explain it anyway, emphasizing instead its pronunciation—si-NECK-doh-kee—which sort of rhymes with Schenectady (sken-ECK-tuh-dee), where the film “seems” to be set. They outdid each other, too, in their praise of the film, while being surprisingly candid about their inability to explain it. Roger Ebert called it “Joycean,” with the richness of literature. He enthused, “It’s about you. Whoever you are,” even though he conceded that he had not fully understood it. As for the ambiguity of the title, he advised readers to “get over it.”

But audiences baffled by the title or confused by the film’s convoluted timeline and the bewildering duplication of characters may indeed wonder what Kaufman intended to communicate. And unlike Roger Ebert, lots of people cannot enjoy a film they do not understand, particularly when it is supposed to be about them. When I went to see the movie a second time, the theater was almost empty. Apparently the thumbs-down-I-don’t-get-it crowd had, by word of mouth, defeated critical opinion.

Too bad. The critical praise is at least partly deserved. Synecdoche is an uncompromisingly ambitious and intellectually challenging film, even if not a masterpiece. Kaufman set out to create a work like Fellini’s 8Z\x, or Bergman’s Persona, films that captivate audiences without compromising the director’s vision. Susan Sontag described Bergman’s achievement in Persona as setting the movie not in the real world but in “the mental universe.” The same might be said of 8Z\x which grew out of Fellini’s Jungian analysis. Unfortunately, where the effort to evoke the mysteries of the human condition succeeded in Bergman’s and Fellini’s films, it can feel like intentional obscurantism in Kaufman’s. Unlike his predecessors who were interested in the mind, Kaufman is preoccupied with the brain and with the findings of neuroscience.

Synecdoche is not, in fact, set in Schenectady but in Kaufman’s 21st century scientific version of the mental universe, where we witness the consciousness of the protagonist Caden Cotard (portrayed brilliantly by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who can apparently meet any challenge), Kaufman’s alter ego, as it experiences the world. Our task—and it is a task—is like trying to understand what is going on in Stephen Dedalus’s mind as he walks along the Sandymount Strand, reflecting on family, nation, Catholicism, death, Hamlet, and the ineluctable modality of the visible and the audible. Caden Cotard’s consciousness is, unsurprisingly, far less interesting than Stephen Dedalus’ mind.

Kaufman has a reputation in Hollywood for quirky, touching, and sometimes hilarious screenplays that are part theater of the absurd and part neuroscience fiction. Being John Malkovich (1999) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) are the best examples. If Bergman and Fellini were Jungians, Kaufman is apparently a devotee of Oliver Sacks.

In Malkovich, Kaufman explored what it would be like to inhabit the mind of another person; it was a cinematic, tongue-in-cheek approximation of the philosophical hypothetical about human identity: who would you be if your brain could be transplanted into another person’s body? In Sunshine, he took on the relation between the self and memory. Who would you be if your unhappy memories could be erased? These neuroscience/philosophy-of-mind puzzlers were central to the conception of Kaufman’s screenplays, and yet under the direction of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry (who also worked on the scripts), audiences could identify with the characters. The narrative, though absurd, was accessible. The films were critical and commercial successes. Kaufman, with his collaborators Gondry and Pierre Bismuth, earned the Oscar for best original screenplay for Sunshine.

In Synecdoche Kaufman took complete creative control as writer, director, and co-producer. In a significant break from the earlier films, he downplayed (or blackened) the humor, making depression’s unrelenting darkness visible on the screen, not only in the person of Cotard but also in the bleak cinematography and the empty facades and derelict locations of the set. After a few moments of Kaufman’s dark humor, what we see is thoroughly depressing and depressed. Cotard is waiting to die and so, he announces, are we all. Perhaps Cotard thinks he is dead already.