Cotard delusion is a rare form of mental illness in which the patient
holds the belief that he is dead, or does not exist, or is decaying. You
can probably begin to guess that a film in which the main character is an
introspective director named Caden Cotard is not going to be a vehicle for
lowbrow laughs with Larry the Cable Guy. (Or, as the Germans call him, Der
Rosenkabelier.) The fact that the film is named after an obscure literary
trope will reassure you in that belief.1
You know for sure that you're in surreal territory when you hear
that the film was written by Hollywood's resident eccentric intellectual,
Charlie Kaufman. The icing on the cake is that Kaufman also directed the
film in his first effort at the helm. His presence in the director's chair
assures that there is nobody to constrain his vision, or to dilute his
communication with the audience. (Or lack thereof.)
The lead character, Caden Cotard, is directing regional theater in
Schenectady, New York (population 60,000) and is in the midst of several
mid-life crises. His wife is disappointed with him, does not respect him,
and is on her way toward becoming a major figure in the art world, which
will cause her to take their daughter off to Germany for good. Caden also
feels that he must have some serious health problems, and his fears seem
to be justified by his various seizures and pustules, which lead him to be
obsessed with decay and death. (Aka Cotard delusion. He should have seen
that coming.)
Just when he seems to have reached the nadir of his existence, he is
awarded a vast sum of money as one of those "genius grants" from the
MacArthur Foundation. This is a turning point in a film which had
previously been somewhat grounded in reality. First of all, there is no
conceivable reason for the MacArthur people to recognize his work as
genius. From what we have seen, he belongs right where he is - in
Schenectady. Second of all, the MacArthur grants ($500,000 or so) could
not possibly finance what we see him doing with the money - taking many
decades to create a full-scale replica of part of New York City.)
So, how are we supposed to interpret all of this? Is this another movie
where the protagonist is dead or dying and is looking back on his life
through a deathbed dream? No, I don't think so. I think we are supposed to
accept this alternate version of reality.
At any rate, Caden decides to use his infinite wealth to create, in a
typical artist's masturbatory fashion, a replica of his own life. As time
goes on, the project becomes larger and more ambitious, and more
confusing. He hires an actor to play himself. When that actor commits
suicide, Caden has to hire another actor to play the first actor, and
another actor to play himself. The actor who plays Caden has an affair
with Caden's unrequited love. The actress who plays the unrequited love
has an affair with the real Caden.
And so forth.
Synecdoche, N.Y. is an odd film to be sure, and one that seems to have
been sent to us from an earlier era when dramatists liked to grapple with
the big ideas, often using non-traditional and non-linear structures to
express those ideas. Pirandello shattered the fourth wall in Six
Characters in Search of an Author. You're probably familiar with the work
of Samuel Beckett, who is most famous for Waiting for Godot; and you may
know of Eugene Ionesco, whose name is closely associated with the term
Theater of the Absurd. If Charlie Kaufman had been born in Europe in 1908
rather than in New York in 1958, his name would be on the same list.
You think I'm exaggerating? Not so. August Strindberg, one of the
pioneers of experimental drama, introduced A Dream Play with this preface
in 1901: "The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense,
dissolve and merge. But one consciousness rules them all: the dreamer's;
for him there are no secrets, no inconsistencies, no scruples and no laws.
He does not judge or acquit, he merely relates; and because a dream is
usually painful rather than pleasant, a tone of melancholy and compassion
for all living creatures permeates the rambling narrative."
I could take that paragraph and apply it directly to Synecdoche, New
York, without changing a freakin' comma.
I admired Synecdoche, New York. I found it engaging not only on an
intellectual level, but also on a visceral one. For a film with such a
convoluted structure and such high-falutin' ambitions, it surprises by
managing to lead with the heart, not with the head. I came out of the film
thinking about the nature of existence, feeling compassion for the
characters, and knowing that I had better watch a comedy before bedtime to
prevent 24 hours of depression. I mean that in a good way, in the sense
that the film delivers the emotional punch it is meant to deliver, despite
a lot of philosophical ruminating, and a lot of confusion. Somehow or
another it will manage to get inside your head, and maybe into your tear
ducts.
Many people had a problem with the time compression of the film, but I
applaud what Kaufman did there. Temporal disorientation is always with us.
The sane as well as the insane lose track of time, especially when it
comes to the current status of people we have not seen for many years. I
have some first cousins on my father's side whom I have not seen since my
grandfather's funeral in January of 1971. At that time I was 21, and they
were in early primary school. When I went back to Rochester for my 40th
high school reunion, I was shocked to discover than one of them was a
grandmother. In my mind they were no longer 8 years old, but I was
imagining them in their early twenties. Kaufman simply takes this sort of
disorientation to the next level. Caden Cotard just can't get a handle on
time. He thinks his wife has been gone for a week when it is a year. He
thinks his daughter is four when she is eleven. He thinks he's just about
ready to open his big play when he's been in rehearsal for seventeen
years. All of that time slips by and he keeps missing the opportunity to
get comfortable with the woman who really loves him. When he finally does
become her lover, it is too late. She dies the next day. Kaufman's script
manages to take our sense of fleeting time and use it as a plot device.
Of course, it would not be a Charlie Kaufman script if that woman had
passed away in some ordinary fashion. She died of smoke inhalation,
because she had been living for decades in a house on fire.
Is this sort of thing marketable?
For Kaufman's work in general: yes. His past writing efforts have not
produced any blockbusters, but they have resulted in accessible,
commercial films for a select but fairly sizable audience - an audience
similar to, but larger than, Woody Allen's market. Eternal Sunshine, one
of my favorite films, grossed 34 million dollars, which is more than any
of Woody's films have grossed in the past two decades.
In the specific case of this film, no. Kaufman has gone too far from
the beaten path this time. Of course, Kaufman is not the only filmmaker
who has trod such a surreal path around the fourth wall. Peter Greenaway's
The Baby of Macon is on the same route, with its multiple layers of
reality and its play-within-a play-within-a-film structure. But
Greenaway's films are not expected to turn a profit. He is an intellectual
creating art films for other intellectuals, using funds provided by
government endowments which are specifically earmarked for prestigious
egghead endeavors. Kaufman, on the other hand, is a former sitcom writer
who is attempting to create commercial films. Synecdoche proved to be so
inaccessible as to be insufficiently appealing even to Kaufman's usual
following, and it could not approach the popularity of Kaufman's most
popular writing projects:
