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Cannes: ‘Synecdoche’ Baffling Yet Intriguing
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I can’t say whether I liked ‘Synechdoche, New York’ because I’m going to need to see it about three-hundred more times to understand it. The directing debut of Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,’ ‘Adaptation,’ Being John Malkovich’) is a meandering morass of time, place, alienation, and claustrophobia.
The film debuted at Cannes this weekend and stars a perfectly cast Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard, a small theater director who stages an ongoing reenactment of his own life in a life-sized replica of Manhattan built in an enormous warehouse.
Cotard finds an almost exact look-alike actress (Emily Watson) to play the role of his recently departed wife (Catherine Keener), but he gets someone taller and thinner (Tom Noonan) to play himself. Eventually, life and art dovetail, converge, and explode.
The cast is first-rate, showcasing great supporting turns from Samantha Morton, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Dianne Wiest. The writing, too, is top-notch in many ways. The weakness is in the direction, which I think lies in Kauffman’s creative approach.
"The way I write is very much without kind of a goal," Kaufman said. "I have something I'm interested in and then I decide I'm going to explore it. I don't know where the characters are going to go. I don't know what the movie is going to do or what the screenplay is going to do. For me, that's the way to keep it alive.
"I tried to approach the directing in the same way. We have the script, we have the actors, and we're trying to figure out what this is, and you don't know what it is. You have to be open to what it's going to become rather than have this thing that you're trying to get to, which is boring."
That kind of approach is fine when you’re sitting in a room alone working out a story. But when the cameras start to roll, a director needs a vision. Structure. Otherwise you end up with, well, ‘Synechdoche.’
Perhaps Kaufman isn’t cut out to direct. He’s a brilliant writer, but he needs someone with more discipline to give shape to his creativity. It’s a shame that ‘Synecdoche’ wasn’t directed by someone else. With such interesting material and such a talented cast, it could have been something special.
