Synecdoche, New York

Philip Seymour Hoffman Michelle Williams and Tom Noonan (playing the Hoffman character as Larry David).

Charlie Kaufman, 2008

 

HOOK:  Citizen Kane without the “Rosebud.”

 

STORY: A  writer and drama teacher at an upstate New York college has a troubled marriage to Adele (Catherine Keener), an artist who paints exquisitely tiny miniature paintings. He flirts with Hazel (Samantha Morton), who runs the box office. And then…  Kaufman’s directing debut will test his fan base to the limits while leaving most moviegoers angry and frustrated.

 

JOHN: This movie starts promising enough. The life of the Philip Seymour Hoffman character is going downhill fast. There’s tension between him and his wife, Catherine Keener (and she’s played this role before), with his young daughter caught squarely in between. Then he gets a huge grant for an arts project and decides to write and produce a play of his life on a grand scale. The interesting scenes are taken from other films—his mistress owns a house that is slowly burning (Barton Fink’s hotel room), he confronts his daughter who is behind glass in a peep-hole sex club (Paris Texas), and at the end, in a huge armory/theater he looks at the rows and rows of stage  settings and props that are his life (Citizen Kane). Then he dies. Kaufman loses an opportunity to have the microcosm of the play teach him (us) about the macrocosm of life (both in the imagined play and through this movie). If the message is we just run out of film, I wish it had happened about 30 minutes earlier.

 

GO (1 out of 4)

 

SPANKY: For once it seemed the cleverness was going to take a secondary place to a film really delving into the meaning of life and relationships (ala Bergman and Fellini in the 50s and 60s). When the look alike characters audition for the roles of “real” people they will play, there is something telling about the relationship of life and art being addressed. But then, nothing. Welles had free-reign with his masterpiece and writer/director Kaufman seems to have it with this. Next time hire a director (Jonze) for your work that yells “cut.” Hoffman walks through the part with that characteristic been-hit-in-the-face-with-a-cream-pie Kaufman movie star look. Charlie, we expect weirdness, but now that you’ve shown you can do that, how about something more.

 

TWO PAWS DOWN” (1 BARK out of 4)

 

GOSSIP:  At one point, I’d swear I saw my neighbor Bob Wake, who Spanky and I went to see this film with, auditioning in the movie for the role of an audience member.

 

KEEPER: “There are no terrible things to say in here only true and false ones.”