[opus]

The trailer for Synecdoche, New York has just popped up in the Intertubes -- click here.

And yeah, it looks like another Kaufman flick: brilliant, absurd, and rather mind-bending. Here's a brief synopsis:

Theater director Caden Cotard is mounting a new play. Fresh off of a successful theatrical run in his hometown of Schenectady, New York, Caden decides to trade in the suburban spectators and local theater for the cultured audiences and bright footlights of Broadway. Awarded a "Genius" grant and determined to create a piece of brutal realism and honesty, something into which he can put his whole self, he gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in Manhattan's theater district. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a small mockup of the city outside.

As the city inside the warehouse grows, Caden's own life veers wildly off the tracks. The shadow of his ex-wife Adele, a celebrated painter who left him years ago for Germany’s art scene, sneers at him from every corner. Somewhere in Berlin, his daughter Olive is growing up under the questionable guidance of Adele's friend, Maria. Caden is helplessly driving his marriage to actress Claire into the ground while neglecting his second daughter. Sammy Barnathan, the actor Caden hires to play himself within the play, is a bit too perfect for the part, and makes it difficult for Caden to revive his relationship with the alluringly candid box office girl, Hazel. Meanwhile, his therapist, Madeline Gravis, is better at plugging her best-seller than counseling him. And a mysterious condition begins systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one.

[Jason Panella]

I was just about the post a thread. I saw the trailer last night and it has really stuck with me. I'm excited to see this. Kaufman is such an interesting writer; I'm not the biggest fan of some of the films he's been involved with (Being John Malkovich, for instance), but the guy is incredibly talented, and I'm always intrigued by what he does.

This looks like it could be incredible.

[techne]

wow.

yikes!

wow.

This post has been edited by techne: 19 September 2008 - 06:56 PM

[Jason Panella]

wow.

yikes!

wow.

In reference to my comment, to the trailer, or to both?

[M. Leary]

Nice piece on this here.

“I take my work very seriously, and there is this stupid system in place that suggests that the director is the auteur and that the writer is just this secondary along for the ride,” he said. “It’s less about trying to be successful than just saying that I am a smart guy, I have a good idea, and I know this script better than anyone, so I am going to take on this movie. It could have been a failure, but that wasn’t really what I was thinking about.”

This post has been edited by MLeary: 19 October 2008 - 05:18 PM

[Overstreet]

Seeing this Thursday, interviewing Kaufman on Friday.


Any questions for him?

[techne]

i wonder if any of the critics are addressing the title i.e. the idea of synedoche - in which a part represents the whole - and using that as a door into interpreting the work?

[Christian]

I still haven't seen it, but Chris Orr has, and although he's still digesting it, he has very nice things to say.

This post has been edited by Christian: 08 November 2008 - 09:56 PM

[Darrel Manson]

I had a good time with this. It is certainly something of a mind game (as are all Kaufman's scripts), and an interesting one. I know Qoheleth is grinning as (s)he watches. I really love the way Hazel's character is cast.

Although Kaufman's answer to Jeffrey's question is that he doesn't deal with matters of faith, I think there could be some lumberjacks in the background here. Well, maybe not faith, exactly, but some sense of the Creator and the Creator's continuing role in creation. How the Creator does or does not control the creation.

[Josh Hurst]

I left my screening yesterday morning feeling exhausted and frustrated by this film, though I was certainly not bored or even displeased with it. I told the publicist it was one of the strangest movies I'd ever seen. Then I went home and couldn't stop thinking about it. It kept me up half the night. And this morning, I realized that I think I love it-- and want to see it again.

I just got an e-mail from the friend I took to the screening, who described the exact same trajectory to me.

In other words: I think this is a very special movie.

[Peter T Chattaway]

I definitely don't "love" this movie, but I feel I should see it again before saying anything about it. It was only after my second viewing of Adaptation, after all, that I "got" that movie and really came to love it.

That said, Synecdoche, New York just seems to wallow in misery, misery, misery, and I'm not sure that I really "get" anything interesting or exciting out of the experience, the way that I do with Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Oh, and note, once again, Kaufman's "baby" fetish. Remember how, in both Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine, there were scenes where women said something along the lines that they wished they could be babies again, because then they would be "new"? Something quasi-similar happens in Synecdoche, when a woman attends a funeral and hears herself described as the person's daughter, and the woman says, "I was a baby," as though this thought is a surprising one and has never crossed her mind before.

[Persona]

I haven't been looking forward to any movie this much in years.

Okay, maybe Batman Begins.

But no film, as opposed to summer movie.

[Crow]

I have to admit, this was a film I admired more than I liked. Mostly this had to do with the main character, who I just didn't find interesting or particularly likeable enough to get emotionally involved with the journey he takes.

But I have to give Charlie Kaufman credit for creating such an intricate storyline and his own intellectual universe in which to structure what he's doing here. I'll be willing to give this film a second viewing because I admired Kaufman's earlier work so much, and I'll probably get more on board with what Kaufman was trying to accomplish.

I did think that the last line Phillip Seymour Hoffman's character spoke in the film was quite poignant.

[DanBuck]

From my reflections about the film. MILD SPOILERS here and on my blog.

The film is truly about our conscious effort to live life. It explores the fact that any attention given to our own existence somehow makes it less authentic. In trying to be true to ourselves, we become someone other than ourselves trying too hard to be whoever we think we are.

There’s a particularly funny and razor sharp moment where an actor walks by Caden on the immense set of the “play”. The actor is not, as far as we know, on stage in that moment, and yet, Caden stops him with the director’s note “No one would ever walk like that.” The actor apologizes, goes back a few paces and tries again, looking far less authentic and far more self-conscious than he was the first time. “No,” Caden remarks, “Keep working on it.” Before we cut to another scene we see the actor cross once more, this time more ridiculously than either of the previous attempts. The film is a metaphysical/anthropological refutation of statements like “act natural” and “just be yourself.”

For the rest of my thoughts - go here.

[Peter T Chattaway]

FWIW, Noah Millman says he "noticed a distinct similarity between Charlie Kaufman’s movie and Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterwork, The Unconsoled, one of my all-time favorite books". He has not yet teased out what he means by that, though.

[Wiederspahn]

Watched this twice in the past few days. Really like it. My favorite Kaufman, for sure. I've always appreciated "Eternal Sunshine..." and "Adaptation", but thought they always came up short on the human emotion side of the spectrum. In fact, many of my actor friends who have read or auditioned for Kaufman pieces tend to say Kaufman's scripts are better than the films. And these are people who still liked the films. But these comments, and my personal feelings about the films, always made me wonder if Jonze and Gondry had become so enamored by Kaufman's style and intellectual ascent that they wound up short on the heart element. After seeing "Synecdoche..." I'm convinced this is the case. Same imaginative style, same intellectual ascent, but this time with some serious human emotion, as well. I now think only Kaufman can truly do Kaufman. The man has a singular world in his head, and its his for the making.

[Persona]

Quote

(Josh Hurst @ Nov 18 2008, 11:32 AM) exhausted and frustrated

Totally. Exactly. Although I don't remember another film lately in which three people can go see it and then spend 1/2 an hour talking about it, even though they were exhausted and frustrated. Isn't the conversation part of the point of a great film?

Quote

(Crow @ Nov 29 2008, 12:43 AM) this was a film I admired more than I liked.

I get this too. It was hard to like without an understood narrative in the end to help us fall in love with it. I was lost in, at the very least, the last 45 minutes of the film. Still, I think Kaufman said more in the form of film (rather than narrative) than could be said in any other medium. You can get lost in a film you don't get, just the same as you can get lost in a religion you don't always get. Some form of truth was in there -- a truth about isolation, and how we connect with each other, and how we heal each other and don't even understand our own power -- a truth about how we build our own plays and disconnect from reality even when we are in it (Any fathers here ever read the paper or watched the News while the kids are going crazy, and we try to ignore it?)... While Synecdoche gave no answers, it certainly supported the questions we face in just plain trying to live.

Quote

(Wiederspahn @ Jan 10 2009, 09:15 PM)>I now think only Kaufman can truly do Kaufman. The man has a singular world in his head, and its his for the making.

Now this I don't know about. The last hour or so just seemed so depressing. It kinda felt like Kaufman needed someone there to remind him, "Hey, even in the midst of this, we can still make 'em laugh, or give 'em hope." Without Gondry or Jones, this was a long haul, a tough mission to follow through on.

My friend described it as boring. My wife described it as non-narrative hopelesness.

I thought it was film outside of film, like a mirror, reflecting how we create others to take care of our own earthen needs.

It's a hard film to sit all the way through. That doesn't mean it isn't a worthwhile trip.

This post has been edited by Persona: 07 November 2009 - 07:26 PM

[Persiflage]

Finally just saw this one for the first time and I was dissapointed.

Boring.

Good for a nap.

Artsy as (expletive deleted).

I think this may just make my hate list. And I think it's because it seems like every line and every scene was expressly made so that it could be endlessly discussed and interpreted by intellectual art house college courses. Yes - they are going to show this film in college now. And I've sat through too many classes full of students over-thinking themselves into a vegetative state, only to be further encouraged by the professor.

Alistair Harkness from the Scotsman said -

Quote

With Kaufman, it's as if he watched Annie Hall and decided that he identified not with the grown-up version of Allen's neurotic comedian Alvie Singer, but with the joyless little boy he used to be, the kid who sits in the doctor's office morbidly depressed about the fact that the universe is expanding and everybody is going to die.

And that was pretty much how this whole film felt. Is that supposed to be profound? Is it supposed to be funny?

I'd also have to agree with Sonny Bunch's summation of the film -

Quote

Ever witnessed a freshman struggle with the writings of Nietzsche and the implications of nihilism on his own self-awareness? Ever wanted to see that struggle blown up on the silver screen for two interminable hours?

Didn't think so.

I'm still a Phillip Seymour Hoffman fan ... just in spite of this film.

[Ryan H.]

The first time I saw SYNECDOCHE, I was kind of bitter about the whole thing. I was ready to dismiss the film. But I haven't been able to forget it; it's stayed with me, day after day. That's not to say it's a great film, per se, but it is a powerful one. The more I've considered SYNECDOCHE, the more I've thought about the brilliance of some of its moments ("artsy" they may be, but they're not hollow). I don't like the emotional place SYNECDOCHE brings me to--in fact, I initially despised the film for taking me to that very empty and dark corner of my person--but it's very, very effective in its endeavors to bring me there.

I'll have to see the film again before I ever offer any real evaluation. I don't know whether it's good or bad or too arty/quirky for its own good or what. It's not an easy film to deal with.

This post has been edited by Ryan H.: 07 November 2009 - 08:31 PM

[Persona]

Ryan H., on 07 November 2009 - 05:56 PM, said:

The first time I saw SYNECDOCHE, I was kind of bitter about the whole thing, and was ready to dismiss the film. But I haven't been able to shake the film. It's stayed with me in a way that not many recent films have. That's not to say it's a great film, but it is a powerful one. The more I've considered SYNECDOCHE, the more I've thought about the brilliance of some moments, and the occasionally powerful dramatic moment. I don't like the emotional place SYNECDOCHE brings me to--in fact, I initially despised the film for taking me to that very empty place--but it's very, very effective in bringing me there.

I'll have to see the film again before I ever offer a real evaluation. I don't know whether it's good or bad or too arty/quirky for its own good or what. It's not an easy film to deal with.

I can certainly understand your reaction, Persiflage. This was a tough experience.

But then again, for me anyway, so is Tarkovsky.

I'm kind of in Ryan's camp on Synechdoche, New York. I appreciate it even if it is tough, and I probably will revisit it again some day.

But now that I know what I'm getting into, I want to be fully prepared before I hit the Play button.