There’s a bit in The Anatomy of Melancholy about the “madness” common to critics, artists, and philosophers, and by extension anyone who remains so lost in thought or creative action that they’re rarely actually fully present in life. “Is not he mad that draws lines with Archimedes, whilst his house is ransacked and his city besieged, when the whole world is in combustion, or we whilst our souls are in danger … to spend our time in toys, idle questions, and things of no worth?” And then author Robert Burton jumps straight into describing a similar sort of madness: “That lovers are mad, I think no man will deny. To love and be wise, Jupiter himself cannot intend both at once.”
Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, is impeccably acted, inventively designed, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and often devastatingly sad. It was also still such a mystery to me after two viewings that I found it hard to trust my own vocabulary to describe what the experience of watching it is actually like. But Burton, rambling on 400 years before the fact, seems to nail it, or at least part of it: a life where the madness of creativity and the madness of love/lust are constantly exchanged for one another, to the point where please from either is unattainable. But it’s also about the fear of death, the impossibility of romance in the absence of longing, the instinct to project our desires on to others and to seek answers about ourselves in mirror images. In other words, as theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) says of his own life’s work, “It’s about everything.”
The film begins on the first day of fall (as an overheard NPR broadcast informs us in hilariously deadpan spoof of highbrow misery), when Caden and his painter wife Adele (Catherine Keener) are about 40, and their daughter Olive is four. What at first appears to be a single morning soon reveals itself as a seamless montage of flashes of weekday breakfasts. In the middle of one of these mornings, a household accident sends Caden to the emergency room, and begets a chain reaction of doctors visits and bodily decay, through which Caden becomes increasingly conscious that the September through December of his years will essentially serve as a countdown to the final comedown. As his body progressively fails him, Caden becomes ever more obsessed with fossilizing his name, his life, in vehicles that he’s confident will outlast him — first his daughter and then, failing that, his art.
When we enter the picture, Caden’s marriage to the rough-hewn Adele, a painter of miniature portraits, seems to be half dissolved, but that doesn’t absolve the unhappy husband’s guilt over his flirtation with Hazel, the box office girl at the Schenectady theater where he’s mounted a successful rethink of Death of a Salesman. Played by Samatha Morton, Hazel has elements of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (she’s almost supernaturally good-natured, she’s inexplicably adoring of our schlubby hero, and, as she lives in a house where there’s a literal fire that never goes out), but with the typical MPDG’s ethereal agelessness swapped out for a surprising saltiness. Refreshingly, she’s neither the magic key that will save Caden from the harsh realities of a that would be meaningless without her, nor is she exempt from rules of that harsh reality herself.
But Caden rejects Hazel out of loyalty to Adele, who it turns out, is getting ready to reject him. Whilst packing to move to Berlin, where both she and Olive will find the creative fulfillment that alludes Caden, Adele plays realist: “This whole romantic love thing, it’s just a projection, right?” Small comfort to Caden, who feeds off projections both personal and professional. With his wife and daughter out of the picture and Hazel having temporarily washed her hands of him, Caden takes up with his leading lady Claire (Michelle Williams). Lovely but bland and extremely eager to please, Claire initially seems like the ideal screen for the projection of Caden’s romantic ideals.
Eventually, armed with a Genius grant, Caden embarks on a massive theater piece, set within a replica of Manhattan built inside a warehouse in Brooklyn. Confident in his concept but nebulous on the play’s actual content, Caden directs his ensemble through a never-ending improvisization, into which scenes from his own life are inserted. Claire starts out playing a version of Hazel; then Hazel returns and Claire moves on to playing Claire. Eventually, Hazel and Caden watch from the sidelines as actors playing them move through the sets, directing other actors. Between lady troubles and creative angst, Caden spends the next several decades watching a simulacrum of his life play out before his eyes, oblivious to the chaos and calamity progressively plaguing the real New York (up to and including giant blimps gliding across the night sky and riots in the streets). Day after day, he shuffles around the warehouse, the play eternally in rehearsals, romantic satisfaction permanently just out of reach. Mounting a great piece of art becomes besides the point, as long as the process continues. The day after losing the woman who he’s now realized was his great love, Caden sets to work working their last 24 hours together into his play. “It was the happiest day of my life, and I’ll be able to live it forever,” he insists. Of course, it’s about staving off death, but it’s also about preserving life, opening up memories wide enough to live in them, confirming that both the present and the past happened and aren’t, or weren’t, merely imagined.
Some of Synecdoche’s detractors insist that the film is impossibly convoluted. It’s not, but a first viewing can be mostly devoted to figuring out the specifics of space and time. Kaufman often jumps years ahead in the space of a cut, but this is almost always directly referenced in the script after the fact. If anything, this continual confirmation would seem like a flaw in the script, a transparent funneling of exposition into dialogue, if Caden’s inability to grasp or cope with the unstoppable march of time wasn’t one of the film’s key themes.
There are parts of Synecdoche that are extremely funny, especially in the film’s first half, but in the end this is by far the most despairing project with which Kaufman has ever been involved. If Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind trafficked in a handful of melancholy truisims about human nature, they were mostly to hopeful ends — love conquering all, etc. Synecdoche is a slap in the face to the idea that human connection could triumph over our inevitable ends, and as such, it induces a kind of self-loathing submission. Synecdoche makes you hate yourself for ever being suckered into the belief that art could save, enhance, explicate, or do anything but fundamentally distract and destroy the small shining lights in the average life. And so it’s heartbreaking when Caden continues to hold on to his delusion that his play is the only way to make his life real — and essentially ensures his own obsolescence in the process.
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