nightlydvdreviewSynecdoche, New York
March 24th 2010 02:24
They're all the leads of their own stories - Caden Cotard
Be excited. Very few filmmakers can pull off nonsensical, postmodern delight as well as Charlie Kaufman, and his first directorial effort Synecdoche, New York is no exception. Having written films including Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, it’s little wonder that Kaufman has taken full visionary charge of this latest ingenious piece of metafiction.
With its wildly creative plotline and relentless pace, Synecdoche guarantees its audience a cinematic joyride of epic proportions. At face value, it follows the fragile life of theatre director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the increasingly odd lives of those around him in Schenectady, New York.
The multilayered narrative never runs dry with an abundance of amazingly bizarre characters like the preciously candid Hazel (Samantha Morton), who works as the box office girl for Caden. She also moves into a house that is forever burning, which becomes a ridiculous motif throughout the film and acts as a metaphor for the choices we make in life. This conveys Kaufman’s tenet that the end is, indeed, built into the beginning.
Caden’s ongoing search for his flower-tattooed daughter Olive builds in emotional intensity, yet it never becomes the film’s tale of redemption that audiences will so eagerly desire. With each passing minute, Synecdoche deviates further and further from reality and plunges into the illusory, metafictive worlds of Kaufman’s brilliant mind.
Synecdoche’s narrative structure is exceptionally choppy and disjointed, more so than any of Kaufman’s other films. Audiences will feel they’ve travelled light years from its beginning to its hazily bleak end, but only after they’ve suspended their disbelief in the fantasies of this postmodern wet dream.
4 STARS
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