CINEMA: Synedoche, New York (Part 2)

When screenwriter Charlie Kaufman burst onto the scene with the wonderfully left of centre Being John Malkovich, it signalled a new and very singular talent had arrived, and this was confirmed by subsequent films such as Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. Now Kaufman returns with a film he not only wrote but also directed and sadly, the resulting pile of self-satisfied, smug triteness is so far up its own sphincter it looks like Charlie boy is going to have to return to the drawing board and start all over again.

Welcome to the world of theatre director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who is suffering something of a midlife crisis. However, his middle-aged angst seems to be doing his directing the world of good and when he is awarded a substantial bursary to start a new work, he rents out a vast warehouse in New York where he plans to produce the ultimate in heightened realism. He builds a set of the city itself and gets actors to play real people, including himself (Tom Noonan) and his one-time girlfriend and collaborator Hazel (Samantha Morton in real life, Emily Watson in the play). But as the line between real life and theatre gets evermore blurred he comes to realise he has created a house of cards that will inevitably fall and bury him.

Kaufman has assembled the most astounding cast on this project including Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams and Dianne Wiest, but he has given them material that is so dry and abstruse it’s a bit like watching a really bad acid trip. While Kaufman plays with time frames, genres, people’s identities and chronologies, he takes his eye off the main reason why the film should exist in the first place, namely to entertain. He is, in effect, entertaining himself, leaving the audience to go hang.

After two hours of such impenetrable onanism you may find yourself yearning for that good old-fashioned story format of beginning, middle and conclusion that doesn’t include a house that is inexplicably on fire for the entire duration of the film.

Dee Pilgrim