SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

REVOLVER ENTERTAINMENT 

RELEASED 15 May 2009

If you enjoyed ‘Being John Malkovich’, ‘Adaption’, or ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, then you’re probably going to like this. If you didn’t like any of those, you won’t like this! All of those movies were pretty weird, but ‘Synecdoche, New York’ has to be the weirdest film of the year.

Theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is mounting a new play while his wife Adele (Catherine Keener) has left him to pursue her painting in Berlin, taking their young daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein) with her. A new relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel (Samantha Morton) has prematurely run aground. And he’s afflicted by a mysterious medical condition. Gathering an ensemble cast into a warehouse in New York City, he directs them to live out the lives of real New York people in a growing mockup of the city outside, including himself and all his acquaintances. Two of these actors, Sammy (Tom Noonan) and Tammy (Emily Watson), who are hired to play Caden and Hazel, are making it difficult for the real Caden to revive his relationship with the real Hazel. Years go by and the warehouse theatre project continues into stranger and stranger territory.

Not since David Lynch gave us ‘Inland Empire’ has there been such an odd, yet creative movie. As much as I enjoyed it, I was left frustrated as to what the movie was really trying to say. It’s pretentious, yet somehow heart-warming. Most of the characters don’t really feel real, and yet I still wanted to find out where the movie was going. At one point, the actor playing Caden gets his own shadow actor, playing him playing Caden. This kind of bizarreness is rife, especially as one minute you think you’re in someone’s house and the next thing you know, it’s being dismantled for the next stage set to go up. One characters’ house always seems to be on fire, which no-one mentions. It’s actually on fire when she is shown around the property! This movie is all kinds of bonkers.

After having his writing directed by the likes of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, this is Charlie Kaufman’s first time as a director, and he almost seems to have decided to make the largest, oddball work he possibly could. What on Earth will come up with next?

FOUR OUT OF FIVE