Review of Synecdoche, New York, directed by Charlie Kaufman

Like so many other great movies I’ve watched during my lifetime, I ended up watching Synecdoche, New York out of pure boredom. Like my previous post on the blog about Sollers Point, I ended up pressing play on this movie after scrolling through Mubi while bored one day.

While I love having the summers off as a graduate student, I end up getting really bored sometimes. I love my life and jobs, but there are some days when I end up just staring at the wall and I can’t be alone with my thoughts like that for multiple days on end.

I had never heard of Synecdoche, New York before now, and was surprised to see Philip Seymour Hoffman. At the time of writing this the man has been almost dead for a decade now, which is wild to me because I remember when he died.

Time is truly flying throughout this lifetime, isn’t it? I decided to watch this one because of how it had Hoffman but also because the synopsis seemed pretty compelling to me.

Onwards with the review!

A theater director struggles to make his magnum opus come literally to life, as it replicates his own.

Our protagonist, Caden Cotard, is deeply struggling from the very beginning of the film. The more astute will notice the reference in his name—Cotard is actually the name of a mental disorder where the individual believes they are dead or do not exist.

Anyways, Caden works as a theater director and is directing a version of Death of a Salesman when his life begins to unravel. He’s not only dealing with physical health problems, but his wife, an artist, decides to leave him and head off to Berlin to start her new life. Worst of all, she took their daughter with him.

The Death of a Salesman revival is considered a smash hit because of how it uses younger people in the roles, and Caden unexpectedly gets a MacArthur Fellowship, which is basically for geniuses.

He decides he’s going to create his magnum opus with the cash money he gets from the fellowship, and he starts to cast an ensemble to start a piece in a warehouse. There, they’re going to create a replica of the streets of Manhattan and create a living, breathing theatrical piece.

Caden ends up having a romantic session with the woman who works in the box office, but actually decides to get married to one of the actresses in his ensemble. At the same time, he becomes more distraught when his young daughter grows up under the influence of one of his ex-wife’s friends, which leads her to become covered in tattoos when still a child.

His relationship with the actress fails too, and then his health continues to grow worse after he visits the doctor with even more symptoms.

At the same time, the world of the play he’s creating is slowly absorbing characteristics of the outside world and is starting to reflect reality. More years are continuing to pass and as Caden struggles even more with his personal and public life. The world of the play is increasingly reflecting this, as he has begun to cast doppelgangers in the roles within the play’s world.

He even casts one of his own stalkers as himself, but that backfires when the man commits suicide on set when it leads to a strange love triangle between the two and the box office girl from before (who’s married with kids).

Eventually, Caden meets his dying daughter, now an adult, who admonishes him for things that aren’t true. She claims he’s a gay man who left the family behind, which is a bizarre take for us who have been following him, and then he ends up leaving that chapter of his life behind after he talks to her.

He decides to cast someone else to take over his role as the director, then lives in the model o his ex-wife’s apartment. Then it is time for him to finally die, and the director of the play tells him to do so.

Overall Thoughts

A fascinating movie, but a lot of the symbolism can go over your head if you’re not paying attention. Some wacky elements contained throughout, but overall I ended up liking the movie and what it represents.

The entire concept of trying to reclaim one’s life through the theatrical warehouse situation is so sad and so creative—it’s something I could see someone like Caden actually attempting to do in real life to escape the circumstances they’re living within.

Definitely one of the better movies I’ve seen in a while but I could see people not liking this one at all.

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