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.”

ADAPTATION

  

Adaptation, 2002

 

Spike Jonze, director

 

   

  

 

HOOK: In an age of dumbed-down movies (The 40-Year-Old Virgin) can a film be tripped up by its own cleverness?

STORY: A movie adapted from a non-story article in the New Yorker. What’s next, a Dreamworks’ version of the yellow pages?

 

GOSSIP: Well, according to Production Weekly, Charlie Kaufman will make his directorial debut with a film called Synecdoche. Not only that, but he managed to snag Philip Seymour Hoffman for the lead role, as well as Michelle Williams. As far as plot goes, pic will center on an “anguished playwright and several women in his life.”

JOHN: There are two especially remarkable scenes: Charlie (the fictional Kaufman snared into doing the movie version based on The Orchid Thief—the movie which, by the way, we are now watching) attends an orchid show. The species has managed to “adapt” by taking on thousands of shapes and color combinations. Seamlessly his attention wanders form the plants to the women there who he concludes have done the same thing. The second scene is when he is experiencing severe writer’s block. Suddenly he has a breakthrough and excitedly dictates his onrush of ideas into a hand held recorder. The verbal tirade continues but now we are watching the dejected writer listening to it, his face full of the frustration and despair of every writer who realizes what he thought would be his salvation is really shit.

GO GO GO (3 GOs out of four)

SPANKY: John, did you notice this movie begins with the shit Charlie later is listening to? Nicolas Cage playing both the twins is great fun.  Meryl Streep is classy and her performance very moving until the last fifteen minutes of the film. Toothless Chris Cooper is the wild orchid man, John Laroche (and will be no matter what other film he appears in). But here is where Adaptation goes wrong. In another great scene Charlie attends a NYC workshop on screenwriting his hack twin brother has recommended. He discovers what his film adaptation needs as an ending. Ironically we in the audience probably agree. But be careful what you wish for, as the old saying goes, because that ending proves disastrously unsatisfying (car chases, gun fights, death scene “truth.”) On the one hand this is intriguing for a movie buff to experience, on the other it is like some terrible endings in the past (Angel Heart, Jacob’s Ladder) that make you angry about the whole film and pretty well negate anything that has gone before. And if the film is trying to “adapt” to today’s audiences, it is a double disaster. Leave the schlock to lesser “Eternal Sunshine” minds, Charlie, give us something we can passionately love too.

“ONE PAW UP” (2 BARKs out of four)

KEEPER: “I‘ve got to stop sweating.”