Charles Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York, currently playing for however long it lasts at the Fox Theater in downtown Portland, is the most depressing movie ever made. As long as you know that going in, you might actually enjoy the experience.
It’s not as if there haven’t been depressing films in the past that have accrued wide audiences. Forbidden Games is a bummer of a war film, and Bergman didn’t let a lot of light — only winter light — into his more severe excursions into existential angst. Amid the general and domineering frivolity of the mass majority of movies, especially Hollywood movies, there is surely room for works that confront reality head on. The only problem is that, as T. S. Eliot said, human beings can only stand so much reality.
Kaufman’s movie, which he both wrote and directed after a long career as a TV sit-com writer and penner of extremely interesting if indeed not unique screenplays, is like a entry from the darker phase of Woody Allen’s prolific career, around the time of Crimes and Misdemeanors, only without the jokes. It tells a simple, practically non-existent story about a Schenectady, New York theater director mounting a massive new play as his family falls apart and he looks into the dark bowels of life, or as Brando would put it, the very ass of death. But in truth, the film merely observes passing life, like a Russian existential short story or a Beckett play. Only without the jokes.
Virtually every single thing that happens to Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in this movie is sad. Even activities that might be enjoyable for a character, such as Cotard having sex with someone who seems to actually like him, turn sorry because of Cotard’s propensity for weeping gratefully and sadly before sex. The gift of a pink box that he gets for his daughter, sequestered from him in Germany by her pretentious artist mother (Catherine Keener, in a typically unpleasant role), where the kid is turned into an internationally famous tattooed Lesbian by the mom and the mom’s pal (Jennifer Jason Leigh), is spied as a discard in a filthy German alley, reducing Cotard to, yet again, tears. The life arc of the daughter, Olive, epitomizes the films dejection and unhappiness, which culminates in her death from the very tattoos imposed on her when she was 10. When Cotard wins a McArthur “genius grant,” he uses it to begin staging a panoramic tale of his own life in an overpopulated Wallace Shawn-style play set in a simulacrum of New York, but he ends up stretching the grant pretty thin as, 17 years later, we learn, it still hasn’t been performed for a public, like a Stanislavski version of Hamlet. The film’s novelty or gimmick is that as Cotard is staging a play about his own life, he hires actors to play the people he knows, so a house of mirrors develops with Hazel (a kooky Samantha Morton), a significant figure in his life, ends up being “played” by someone else (the no-nonsense Emily Watson), and interacting during endless exploratory rehearsals.
The original screenplay is, if anything, even more depressing. For example, one of the characters finds a dog squished in the road, the tire treads still visible in its middle. This deeply damaged dog stays around a long time, outliving most of the other characters. In scenes such as this, and the ones that made it into the finished film, Synecdoche New York describes a dream logic, the way scenes change and odd events occur without notice in our dreams. Kaufman told an interviewer that it is his version of the horror film that someone had asked him to make, that the fear of death and the inexorable passing of time are to him the true horrors to fear, the truly scary things in life.
At one point, Cotard is sitting on a staircase talking on the telephone. In the background stacked up against the wall is a pile of books, one of which is Deirdre Bair’s (controversial) biography of Samuel Beckett. It’s rather obvious in the decor of the room, unmissable, but is also upside down, so the viewer probably really has to know the book in order to see it. Maybe the volume is simply a bit of decor befitting the ambiance of an avant-guard theater director, but it is also possible that Kaufman is signaling his artistic inspiration, that is, a writer who stares unflinching at the worst that life has to offer, yet recounts its sorrows with real humor. Kaufman offers up here a Beckettian vision of life. Only without the laughs.
As my screening companion noted, every scene in Synecdoche New York seems like a concluding scene. The film continually feels like it is rounding toward an “ending,” from even its first sequence on, but the end doesn’t come until Cotard, his life weirdly taken over by the actress now playing him in the production, instructs him to die. If there is a through line in the movie it’s the observation that the results, no matter how many years later, of the decisions that we make when younger, are, can be, or will inevitably be dire. Olive decides to let herself be tattooed and the chemicals eventually kill her as an adult. A young Hazel eagerly buys a house as a symbol of her maturity, a house that strangely has fires going on throughout it; as an adult she eventually dies of smoke inhalation. This theme is emphasized in a speech given by a preacher at a funeral in the play within the film (a scene written the night before and not found in the versions of the script available on line), who alludes to the million unknown consequences of our decisions. The fact remains, however, that the decisions directors make also have long lasting consequences.
The wait is over. After 15 years, after $12 million spent and after a hard rock soap opera of a story, the world finally has a new Guns N’ Roses album, “Chinese Democracy.” Time will tell how this album is ultimately accepted (there’s still a lingering shock it was even finished) but for now it’s difficult to regard it more as a heaping pile of too much and too many: too much studio time, too many varieties of artistic direction and too much Wall of Sound.
