At the Movies with Governor Tom: Synecdoche, New York

I should admit off the bat that I have mixed feelings about Synecdoche, New York, which I caught tonight at the ArcLight Hollywood. But I'm going to go ahead and write a post about it because at least I was rewarded afterward with an in-person appearance by Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter extraordinaire behind Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He was Oscar-nominated for Malkovich and Adaptation and finally scored a trophy for Eternal Sunshine. I wasn't too crazy about Human Nature, but I love all the other stuff he wrote. So when I saw he was conducting a Q&A following tonight's screening, I couldn't pass up the opportunity. I'd actually seen him at the ArcLight before. Back in 2004, around the time Eternal Sunshine came out, he did a three-night Q&A at the Arclight for Eternal Sunshine, Malkovich, and Adaptation. The Eternal Sunshine screening sold out before I could get to it, but I did make it to the other two. What I remember taking away was that Charlie didn't want to be there at all. He never got loud or hostile. He's a shy guy, very soft spoken, but irritability is impossible to hide. Tonight, I'm pleased to say, he was much more affable and engaging with the audience. Now if only the movie were better. Oh, and by the way, Charlie also directed it. This was his debut behind the camera.

Let me give the rundown on the story as best I can. I won't give away too much, but I don't think I could if I wanted to. This isn't the easiest flick to wrap your brain around. Now sometimes that can be a good thing. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a puzzle, especially toward the end, but it's undoubtedly a masterpiece. Not so here. Synecdoche, New York becomes too puzzling for its own good. It sort of strains to be a masterpiece....and then folds in on itself like a soggy pretzel. Really, if it weren't for the terrific cast, I don't think I would've enjoyed this at all.

Okay here's the scoop. The always-awesome Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a theater director in the New York suburb of Schenectady. When the film starts, he's putting on a production of Death of a Salesman. It goes over well enough that he scores a grant to write a new play for the Great White Way.

While his professional life's going okay, his personal life is a disaster zone. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) is a painter who specializes in these still-lifes so tiny that people viewing her exhibitions have to wear these little magnifying glasses. Just as her career takes off, she up and leaves Caden for Berlin, taking their daughter Olive with her. Over the course of the film we see the occasional art magazine cover with Adele on it. Her European career thrives. At one point, twenty years or so later, Caden pays a visit to Berlin to find that Olive is a tattoo-covered stripper who only speaks German. They may as well be strangers, having lived worlds apart for so long. It's actually one of the more affecting parts of the film.

Meanwhile Caden's health slowly deteriorates via one mysterious malady after another. From the very first time we see him, when he's young and still with Adele and Olive, these weird symptoms start manifesting themselves, like lime-green shit or what have you. Seriously, lime-green shit.

Caden uses the grant to put on a full-blown monster-sized production of...well...let's see. It's basically a play involving a cast of literally thousands inside this ginormous warehouse where Caden does his darnedest to build a life-sized replica of Manhattan. He doles out instructions to the cast with little Post-Its. "You just found out your wife's cheating." "You just found out you have cancer. Should you tell your family?" He even casts someone to play himself. And it's not just anyone. It's this guy Sammy (Tom Noonan) who's been stalking Caden for years. During auditions when Caden's trying to find someone to play himself, Sammy comes in and says something like, "If you want to see how you really are, cast me."

The production stretches on for decades and only gets bigger. Time is very fluid in the film, so it's tough to say exactly how much time we're covering here. But Caden's a pretty old fart at the end, so I'd guess he works on this opus for close to half a century. During this time he continues having one complication after the next with the various women in his life. He marries an actress named Claire (Michelle Williams), and they eventually have a daughter. But he also rekindles a fling with his former box office assistant Hazel (Samantha Morton). The weird thing about Hazel is that her house is always on fire. There's only two or three scenes there throughout the picture, one toward the beginning, when Caden's still married to Adele and Hazel has just bought the place. It has these little fires in the wall 'n shit. Pretty weird. And then decades later, when they're in their golden years and are sort of reviving their feelings for each other, Caden goes back to her place. Sure enough, these same little fires are smoldering all over the place.

A few other terrific actresses show up. During his trip to Germany, Caden meets a friend of Adele and Olive's named Maria, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Back in New York, the actress he casts to play Hazel is played by Emily Watson of all people, looking particularly fetching. She actually accompanies Caden to his father's funeral, another one of those affecting scenes that stands out because of its humanity in an otherwise tough-to-relate-to story. Hope Davis plays his shrink. The great Dianne Wiest shows up in the second half of the film as another actress in the production. She and Caden form this touching little bond that keeps him going in an otherwise bleak life.

And he gets older. Time jumps ahead really fast in this film. The only indication you have is how much makeup Philip Seymour is wearing in this scene compared to the last scene. And of course his health sinks into the shitter (pardon the pun). The production gets pretty meta. You have Sammy playing Caden in the production. And then there's a scene where Sammy is casting "actors" to play "himself" in a life-sized production about New York. And then those actors cast actors to put on a production. The freakin' thing becomes an onion.

The title, by the way, is sort of a play on words. It sounds like you're saying Schenectady, New York. But the word synecdoche, as I only found out a few days ago, means a part that is representative of a whole. Ostensibly that would refer to the production Caden puts on. But the film itself, how it jumps through time to afford us glimpses of Caden at various stages of his life, could be a synecdoche not only of Caden's life, but of life in general. I think. That is, if you buy into Charlie Kaufman's mercilessly bleak point of view. Me? I tend to be an optimist, yet one more reason why this flick rubs me the wrong way.

The Q&A was moderated by this chap called Whipp, Glenn Whipp, film critic for the Daily News. The first thing he asked Charlie was how in Christ he came up with this story. That's when Charlie, who looks young at fifty, told us about how Sony Pictures mogul Amy Pascale tried to get him and Spike Jonze to work together on a horror flick. Charlie was game, but Spike was busy directing one music video after the next before signing on to adapt Where the Wild Things Are. Apparently that's been delayed quite a bit due to some pretty terrible test screenings. Anyway, Charlie stuck with Sony and eventually got them to let him direct the proposed horror picture. He never did say what the plot of that horror film was supposed to be, only that it eventually mutated into the Russian doll we got to see tonight. Of course, from a certain point of view, Synecdoche, New York is a horror film. As Charlie said tonight, aging and mortality and living alone and lying sick in a hospital are pretty freakin' scary.

As someone with all that added responsibility, Charlie's schedule during the 45-day shoot was fairly rigorous, but he also said that since he has insomnia anyway, trying to catch enough Zs was never really an issue. He only averages about four hours of interrupted sleep per night, so directing a feature film, by all accounts a brutal and thankless job, would seem to suit him just fine. What made making this film a bit extra hairy was that it had upwards of two hundred scenes, far and above the average. Back during film school I took this one class where they made us pick any film we wanted to do a scene-by-scene breakdown. You know, we'd watch a scene, pause it, and then write a brief description of it, numbering the scenes as we went along. I did the original Star Wars. I'm sorry, I mean Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope. Anyway, it clocked in at something like seventy or eighty scenes. And just about everyone else had a scene count in the sixty to eighty range. Recently I did a similar scene breakdown for both Dave and The American President as part of research into a Presidential comedy of my own, and both of those films were somewhere in the sixties. Synecdoche, New York, meanwhile? Two hundred. That might be yet one more reason why audiences probably won't warm to it. It's not like anyone besides a film geek would think about the number of scenes. Still, like bad editing, audiences might detect it on a subconscious level. Props to Charlie, though, right? Dude was able to film four scenes per day on average. That's extremely fast.

That's why, in response to someone asking if the film was as weird to make as it was to watch, Charlie said it wasn't weird at all. Because of the practical demands of the schedule, the film production was very grounded in reality. He'd show up and put in a good eighteen hours a day, every day, and was very down to earth with his cast. I believe it because he was very down to earth during the Q&A. His normalcy is noteworthy because of how unique his films are. Maybe he channels all of his eccentricity into his art or something so that he himself can stay normal. He did add that while the first ten hours of the day usually went well, during the next eight hours he'd have to go give the producers a what-for now and again for trying to make him change something. Anyway, one touching little tidbit he shared with us was that his dad lived with him during the production. Charlie's fifty, so I can only imagine that his dad's pretty up there in years. Apparently he was in the audience tonight, but Charlie spared him the spotlight so I'm not sure where he was sitting. Anyway, during the production he moved in with his boy and provided moral support. Dad said that even if the production didn't pan out, it wouldn't negate the huge accomplishment of writing it and at least trying to mount it.

The main thing Charlie wanted to get at with this film was the fluidity of time, which is pretty apparent when you watch this thing, and how it leaps ahead years from scene to scene. Charlie says it amazes him how ten years can go by in a blink. You can remember something that happened ten years ago as if it were yesterday, but you have a tough time trying to remember all the stuff that happened in the intervening years. The person you are at age fifty isn't so different from the person you were at twenty.

Both he and Philip Seymour Hoffman had an interesting temporal experience on the film that may reflect how caught up in the story they got. It took Catherine Keener the first two weeks of shooting to do all of her scenes. And then that was a wrap for her. Even though the film only had one more month to shoot, it seemed a lot longer. A couple weeks after Catherine left, during which time they'd filmed over fifty more scenes, it felt to Charlie and Philip that she hadn't been gone for two weeks but two years. Philip told Charlie that it really did feel like entire gobs of his life were whizzing by at light speed. Man, if two weeks seemed so long to them, can you imagine how much of an eternity the entire six-week shoot must have seemed like? By the way, when you watch this thing, it's impossible not to notice the sheer number of clocks and watches. Seriously, in almost every scene there's a clock visible somewhere.

It was inevitable that someone would ask Charlie about Samantha Morton's perpetually burning house. But he wouldn't give it up! Obviously it's a metaphor for something, but for what? He did have an answer but said it was only one person's opinion. At screenings for this thing he's had people come up to him and offer their own opinion of what the burning house means. He's heard so many compelling interpretations that he's given up saying what he thinks. Whatever you the viewer take away from the burning house is no less valid. Seriously, the whole friggin' film could be looked at as a metaphor. I think if you go in prepared not to take what you see literally, you might have an easier go of it. Sort of. So what do I think of the burning house? Well, toward the end, when Samantha Morton's already very elderly, her character dies of smoke inhalation. Mind you, she'd been living in this burning house for decades, and she only just then dies of the smoke. That might help you figure out the meaning, but it hasn't helped me yet.

It's funny. A good share of Charlie's stories have plots that fold in on themselves and become sort of meta. He swears he doesn't set out to do that every time he sits down to kick off a brand new script. Another thing he doesn't think about is how commercial his story is. He just sits at his computer and goes with it. Lucky bastard. Unfortunately, though, while that may have worked when he was collaborating with talented directors, it may not work this time around. Time will tell, of course, but no matter how much he screams from the rooftops that this film is an allegory or a metaphor, it probably won't fair very well.

Speaking of which, one thing that got him all primed to direct was his collaborating with those other directors. I suppose I'm speaking of the films he wrote which were directed by either Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry. On all of those, Spike and Michel were good about involving him in the production. Once again, he's very lucky to have had those opportunities, as most screenwriters are pretty much shut out of the process once the cameras are rolling. That only happened to him once, with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. That was George Clooney's directorial debut. Once he bought that off Charlie, he took it and ran with it and didn't involve Charlie at all. Apparently a lot was made of that at the time, like there was some sort of drama between George and Charlie. When Glenn asked him about that tonight, Charlie swears that got blown out of proportion. And it probably was. It sounds like what happened on Confessions was what happens to most screenwriters once they've sold their baby. Charlie's a big believer in compromise. It's impossible to work on a production with all those egos and creative types and not have your script change in some way, shape, or form. He even went so far as to say it would be bad if the script didn't change at all during the production. Which, of course, is true. I mean shit, if that happened, it would call into question what the director's doing there if they're not exercising at least a little bit of their own creative vision.

And finally someone asked him about the directors who've inspired him. Among the names he threw out were Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, a couple of Englishmen who are among the least commercial directors you'll ever come across. Like Charlie, they've somehow managed to make films that ultimately do make money because of good critical word of mouth. Mike Leigh is one of my favorites too. I've always marveled at how he essentially "writes" his stuff through six or so months of improv with his cast. Charlie said he's also a fan of stuff by Tom Noonan, who played the actor playing Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film. Tom Noonan's primarily an actor but does write and direct his own little microbudget films now and then. In particular Charlie said he's fan of this flick Tom made about ten years ago called Wang Dang. It's about an aging washed-up director who comes to a school to impart some wisdom onto a new generation of storytellers but somehow manages to screw even that up.