Back Stage

SASA MAJUMA | Tuesday March 2, 2010 00:00

Synecdoche, New York is being shown today only at 7 pm at the A/V Centre at Maru a Pula School by the Gaborone Film Society. It was one of the ten best films of 2008. Yet it has largely gone unnoticed. It was hailed as one of the top 10 films of that year by many movie critics, but a few also decreed it one of the worst - the only movie of 2008 to make the top 10  and the bottom 10. It is both funny and not funny at the same time.

Synecdoche, New York is a creation of scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman whose previous challenging hits have been Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Synecdoche, New York is his first film as a director. Kaufman has been compared to the great Swedish writer-director, Bergman. His films are serious and challenging vehicles that explore our minds and reflect us in them. Remember our minds are a vessel from which arise perceptions of reality, our fantasies, our desires and dreams, even our illusions and hallucinations.

Kaufman's new creation, Synecdoche, New York, is so convoluted and confusing, it easily looses its audience. It spans fifty years in the life of a theatre director, Caden Cotard (played first by Philip Seymour Hoffman), who keeps trying to re-invent his life, working over decades with actors who play him, his three women and his two daughters by two of his three loves. Caden was based in Schenectady, New York, where he had a loyal following.

He is seeking something more in life, but seems never to be sure what that is. Is this film tracing the arc of a purist perfectionist and all the unintended consequences of perfectionism? Caden always seems to be mounting a new play - is it the same one, and evolving one, or what? Then Caden received a genius grant, the MacArthur Award. This allows him to move on.  Caden re-establishes himself in New York City in a giant warehouse. He is fortunate to have a loyal (and not-so-loyal) following. They form a repertory company. With them he hopes to create a work that is honest, the naked truth, totally challenging, the best. Can this be achieved while celebrating the trivial and mundane? In the gigantic warehouse he is able to re-create and develop significant, to him, parts of the city and in it their lives must unfold. Caden hopes to tap as close as possible to the realities of life, but his striving results in unending time being devoted to rehearsals and constant new constructions of his city within the warehouse. He becomes Quixotic and his quest Sisyphean. Within this framework we seek love, experience aging, and constantly re-create our world of expectations for the present and the future. It is all one giant simulacrum (a name nearly given to this film). It is complicated by Caden's life continually falling apart. His wife Adele Lack (Catherine Keener) and daughter Olive (acted by Sadie Goldstein when four-years old, then as an adult by Robin Weigert) had left him for a new life in Berlin and its wild art world. There Olive falls under the wing of Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her life is transformed. Caden will never really know Olive again.  With Adele gone he becomes involved with the box-office receptionist Hazel (Samantha Morton), a red-head who symbolically lives in a house that is always on fire. Yet Caden marries again, and to an actress, Claire Keen (Michelle Williams). An earlier play within the play of The Death of the Salesman stars her. Is there a limit to autobiographical approaches in the theatre? As the years pass and the Work in Progress (yes, a WIP) continues, the arrival of a new force Millicent Weems (Dianne Wiest), will change things. Synecdoche, a literary term for a part that represents the whole, is perhaps a good name for this movie. But does it ever find the whole, or only end up as the years go by, the set keeps growing, just creating more parts? Synecdoche, New York is two hours and 4 minutes long. It is rated 15+. Charlie Kaufman is the writer and director. The cinematographer is Frederick Elmes. The editor is Robert Frazen. The music is by Jon Brion. The production designer is Mark Friedberg.   sasa_majuma@yahoo.co.uk