Synecdoche, New York

Charlie Kaufman, 2008

5/5

This is one of those films that after you process, it, it changes you. You want to tell your other movie-lover friends to go see it so you can gauge their reaction. They ask you “what’s it about?”. That’s the challenging task. “Okay, so it’s about a struggling playwright played by Philip Seymour Hoffman”. They reply “That’s it? That sounds kind of boring”. Your brain rattles, trying to come up with a better way to describe the film. “Okay, so it’s about a struggling playwright who works on an ambitious project after getting substantial funding and is able to recreate a miniature New York inside a massive warehouse that he purchases”. Closer. More descriptive, but no, that’s still not it. Maybe this is just another one of those films that you say “Just go see it.”

Synecdoche is one of those films sort of difficult to really discuss upon first viewing. It almost demands rewatching. The attention to detail, the exhausting carefulness that Kaufman clearly puts into his film. It’s one of those films that after looking back on it a few days later, there’s a dream-like quality to it. There is lingering imagery. Life and death. The fear of death, the neverending clinging to one’s mortality. Hypocondria, paranoia of being ill or falling ill. Parental pressures, the fear of losing your family or struggling to live without your family by your side. Career insecurities, self-doubt on the creative level. It’s also an examination of the American marriage, or at least a focus on a fading relationship. Complacency, marital boredom. Love lost, wandering eyes, jealousy. Kaufman is a genius when it comes to taking everyday life and completely manipulating it. Sometimes he is just toying with it slightly, with a minor hallucination. At others he is bending the world in different shapes and forms. He is an artist with a lot to say, and there’s not enough room in the massive warehouse to store it all. Hoffman’s Caden character is one of the more complex characters to come out of 21st century cinema. As he seems to grow more and more disconnected from reality, his artificial world seems to grow more elaborate. There are certainly people out there who will watch a film like this and pick it apart. It’s a complicated film. At times probably over-complicated. But that’s sort of what Kaufman has done with his screenwriting, so why would he not do the same thing while sitting in the directors’ chair? Nobody but Kaufman could conceivably make a movie quite like Synecdoche. He turns parts of upstate New York and New York City into an urban mind-field. The final result is some kind of surreal hybrid of Vanilla Sky, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. And who wouldn’t want that?

Enough Said

Nicole Holofcener

Can I Stream It?

3/5

Enough said doesnt do what a lot of modern Romantic Dramedies do in taking two mid-tier actors and confronting them with a far fetched premise. Instead here they take two great performers who have good on-screen chemistry and give them a far fetched premise. In a sense its like the best Meg Ryan movie shes never been in. The late great Gandolfini plays a version of his alternate dimension amazingly compelling story-thread guy Kevin Finnerty from the immortal Sopranos with his Albert character. He displays his range, and for the most part you never really feel like he is going to get physically threatening. This goes against the notion that after Sopranos he would forever be type-cast as the mob-boss with mommy issues (wow that is a wicked generalization isn't it?). It was ultimately unfair to typecast Gandolfini because he really did have a lot of other weapons in his arsenal. He brought the threatening force in films like True Romance or Killing Them Softly but then he would bring deliver more subdued but more elaborate characters in Where the Wild Things Are and Zero Dark Thirty. Here he is a man still exhausted from a toxic marriage. He is more than ready to move on and put the past nightmare behind him. It's really his wife who continues to beat his idiosyncrasies into the ground, without him there. Sometimes it almost feels like she's still married to him, but a ghost of him, after he's eagerly moved on with the next chapter of his life (not looking back either) and is no longer a physical presence in the house. The one thing that brings the two of them together is the fact that they are both at the same point in their lives: divorced, cynical, and raising college-aged kids.

Julia Louis-Dreyfuses character Eva is a bit more challenging. She has a healthier relationship with her ex, who has his own HBO background with the much short-lived forgotten-but-great Carnivale. But her relationship with her daughter Ellen (Tracey Fairaway) is befuddling and not really well laid-out. You know that there is tension between the two, and then there's a leap to Eva spending more time with Ellen's best friend. There isn't a lot in between that. And there probably should be. But at the end of the day, it's excusable and not really that important. What's more important is the chemistry between Eva and Albert feels real. It's a nice send-off for Gandolfini, even if it's not his last film (two more in post-production as of June of 2014).