Synecdoche, NY

Shattuck Cinemas held a sneak peek of Synecdoche, NY, along with a Q&A with writer/director Charlie Kaufman. In case you don't remember, Kaufman wrote the screenplays for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Btw, if you're like me and have no idea what synecdoche means, here's the wiki entry for it.

The movie is really interesting. I had certainly enjoyed it and it held my attention, but I'm still not sure to what degree I like the film. Like all of Kaufman's movies, this one is quite weird and has a lot of dreamlike elements permeating throughout. The movie is good in the sense that I'm still thinking about it and what all the pieces of the movie mean. However, it does meander a bit in the middle, which makes the approximately two hour running time seem really really long. I don't really know how to describe the movie or the plot. It's largely about death, but also everything else. The movie focuses on the life of Caden, a theater director, from ages 40-80 and his struggles with his personal life and the development of his magnum opus he's putting together.

Charlie Kaufman seems like a pretty shy guy, possibly a bit of a recluse. In any case, he seemed nervous when giving a brief introduction to the film, but the Q&A afterwards was good. Kaufman declined to answer questions about the significance behind certain scenes or elements, because he doesn't want his motivations to be the end of the discussion. His movies are in some sense a conversation with the audience. He writes what he is interested in and presents it in the hopes that we may, for at least that brief moment, be interested in it as well. Our side of the conversation is how we interpret what he puts on screen or if we find our own significance in the movie if any. I asked him how he came up with the title. It was just one of the title ideas he came up with while writing the screenplay that he liked.

I didn't really identify at all with the characters. I don't think I've reached that age yet, so I didn't speak in that way to me. I'm going to do a little bit of interpretation of the ending of the movie so if you'd like to bail out now then do so. If not, then keep reading, although I don't know if what I write will make any sense if you haven't watched it yet. But just in case....

*SPOILERS*
(highlight to read)

Inadvertently or not, Kaufman dropped the hint that the movie is also about aging and how the elderly are pushed aside and forgotten. For the most part, the film is really focused on Kaden and his medical and relationship troubles. It gets really weird by the end, and we find an 80 year old Kaden living inside a closet with some woman speaking to him through an ear piece telling him what to do. The movie is about Kaden and yet it isn't. He's been pushed to the periphery to be forgotten, hidden inside a closet. He is told what to do by some voice. Like the elderly, he is a slave to another person's words, until he is told to "die." Kind of depressing really. There are a lot of existentialist undertones to the movie and repeated comments as to how insignificant we all are. I don't remember the exact phrasing of the sentence, but the gist is something like this: we are all extras in other people's lives. We are all the primary subject of our own biopic, but we are also the faceless extras that pass through the lives of others, like extras on a set. I remember reading a bumper sticker that said something like that, but I don't recall the exact wording. Anyway, like it or not, the movie makes you think... partly because it's just so weird and head scratching inducing.