Charlie Kaufman's 'Synecdoche, New York' Is Hilariously Surreal; Yet Melancholy (Script Review)

syn·ec·do·che Pronunciation[si-nek-duh-kee] –noun Rhetoric. a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part, the special for the general or the general for the special, as in ten sail for ten ships or a Croesus for a rich man.

We will get a chance to see Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" early (we hope) so we're going to spit out our script review now before it's too late for us and moot once we've seen the film. There's mild spoilers throughout, but if you've read our past work, you know we're always careful to convey the mood and tenor rather than spoil plot points.

The basic synopsis is this: The film spans the 40 year life of a theater director (played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who ambitiously attempts to put on a play by creating a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse involving all the women who have been apart of his life (Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson and others). Meanwhile, a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his body's autonomic functions and threatening the completion of his life's work.

A bit more detail: As you've probably read, the story centers around the struggling self-involved theater director Caden Cotard (Hoffman) who's work is criticized as impersonal by his unsympathetic and seemingly distant wife Adele (bitch du jour Catherine Keenar). They have a precocious four-year-old daughter named Olive (preoccupied with the color of her poop) and their relationship appears strained. Caden can't seem to please his wife no matter how he tries. Dejected he fancies the ego-stroking advances of Hazel (Samantha Morton), a receptionist who works in the theater he rents out to rehearse his plays. She flirts and while he puts off her advances, he appreciates the warmth, understanding and sympathy she gives him. It's the first of many women Cotard turns to out of selfishness, loneliness and comfort in the story.

While he's already beginning to feel off from the beginning of the story, a random shaving accident at home seems to either accelerate or exacerbate his issues and soon he's off to see an opthamologist (a doctor that studies the the anatomical functions and the treatment of eye disorders). The puzzled doctor can't seem to find out what's going wrong with Caden – his eyes aren't properly dilating – and soon, his anatomical functions seem to start failing one by one. His stool (the color of one's stool is a constant theme in the movie) turns gray; he grows sores, pustules and lesions; his eyesight begins to fail and he's constantly suffering some small ailment or another which may or may not relate to the bump on the head he received in his accident.

Convinced he's dying, Caden begins to mount an ambitious play about life and eventually his own life. He's not sure exactly what it's about, but he begins exploring it to obsessive levels, staging it with exact replica sets and character based on his life that grow and grow in detail and scope exponentially through the story. Actors are soon encouraged to not perform, but exist 24-7 within the confines of the ever-increasingly huge and realistic sets and live out their roles. They explore the real-life people they're based on by staying in character and living among the fake city/gigantic theater warehouse, all the while as Caden and his various assistants take notes. It's gradually becomes a living, breathing on-going and morphing experience more than a tangible play and it goes on and on and "not finished" for about 40 years. This is where it all gets a little meta, head-trippy, but still really absurd in an extremely funny and Kaufman-esque way.

Claire (Michelle Williams) plays the beautiful star of his untitled play and a person he finds out has been stalking him, Sammy (Tom Noonan), soon takes on the role of Caden in the play (we can't really do it justice, but the role of Sammy is a laugh-riot of writing and a wonderfully amusingly odd persona).

[Minor Spoilers in the next graph, nothing major, but skip to the following graph if you just want tone and mood]

Adele (Keener) takes Olive off to Germany for an art exhibit (she's famous in her own right) and eventually never returns with no explanation to Caden (relax, she's a minor character). A sullen and confused Caden tries to take refuge in women like Claire and Hazel with moderate to minimal success. To go into plot details further than that will probably on serve to confuse rather than spoil, so we'll leave it at that, but Hope Davis plays Caden's self-serving therapist Madeline (she's always pushing her recently published self-help book), Jennifer Jason Leigh plays an assistant to Adele that acts as an interloper between Caden and his family named Maria, Emily Watson plays Tammy, a woman who is cast in the play as Hazel and Dianne Wiest shows up towards the end of the film as housekeeper and the woman who takes the role of the housekeeper in the play (Note: Tilda Swinton was originally cast in the film and now has nothing to do with the film, she seemingly would be perfect for the role of the therapist).

While 'Synecdoche' is dreamy and odd – a house that's perennially on fire is never explained – it's not entirely confusing. Also it's wickedly funny in a dark and twisted way; usually at the expense of Seymour-Hoffman's character.There's a hilarious little subplot with fictionalized versions of Dakota Fanning and Haley Joel Osment's live's 20 years from now that's pretty much too difficult to explain (now that we think of it, the whole thing is difficult to explain, though not difficult to hang with in read).

While it is abstract, delirious, ambitious, arty and a bunch of other superlatives, it's not as heady or much more surreal than say "Being John Malkovich" was, or at least, not in the beginning anyhow. Though "Synecdoche, New York" does get progressively weirder as the story evolves and the characters grow older, but it's not as outright odd as some have suggested (well, at least the script; we haven't seen the movie yet).

In May, Charlie Kaufman told the Hollywood Reporter, "I was interested in not explaining things, having them just be poetic," and that's exactly what the ending of the script is like. Only, it's actually more confounding and confusing.

As we wrote briefly a few weeks ago, 'Synecdoche' is "gloriously funny in that dark and twisted Charlie Kaufman idiosyncratic manner, it's incredibly melancholy and seemingly autobiographical and its ending is fairly obtuse. We're hoping in the live execution, the conclusion will be more poetically abstract than flat out confusing, but we'll have to wait and see." And this still stands, 'Synecdoche, will probably live and die by its ending that's either going to be weird and obtuse for people or going to be surrealistically sublime in a poetic and illuminating manner. It's hard to say and it could go either way for many audiences. If he can keep it on the keel of "Adaptation" or 'Malkovich' it could be fine, but we can see that it does have the potential to go off the rails a little bit. Of note: women seem to find the story rather lugubrious and sad-sack, and while there are elements of that, to us there's also a lot of incisive and humors self-jabs at man-childness and the inability to grow up.

At it's worst (or best, depending on your p.o.v.), 'Synecdoche' is a hall of mirrors refracting over and over again, a psychological wormhole, a kaleidoscopic prism of metaphysical other worldliness, and a figurative or metaphorical ouroboros – an ancient symbol depicting a snake eating its own tail – as the story not only acts in a circular manner, but it tends to devour itself into an eerie nothingness. But that, we think anyhow, is the point. What we're trying to say is it just might be an allegory for the dangers of navel-gazing and solipsism. It's a bit of a self-made nightmare by the conclusion, and that makes sense since it was originally conceived as a personalized horror. Whatever the case may be, reality does blur and bend eventually, but we're damned if we can't wait to try and make sense of what it all means.

PS, if you've forgotten, Michel Gondry/Paul Thomas Anderson musical mainstay, Jon Brion is composing the score. That itself should be worth the price of admission. The film hits theaters October 24 via Sony Pictures Classics.
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Did Charlie Kaufman Write Music For His 'Synecdoche, New York' Film?

You can only fit so much about one movie in one blog post. Meanwhile, a little tidbit via Premiere. There's a strange tattoo theme running through Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York."

In an interview with Tim Kern, the tattoo artist who worked on the film (who let 'Synecdoche' actress Jennifer Jason Leigh tattoo him), this small kernel of music information came out.

"Charlie [Kaufman] had really specific ideas of how he wanted the tattoos to look, actually. So one of the tattoos is all flowers... he wanted specific flowers to go with some music he had written for the scene. So I did some sketches based on the ideas he had and showed them to the makeup people, and they showed them to Charlie."

Screenwriter, director and now we add musician to his list of credits? It remains to be seen whether it's something he wrote and handed off to a composer or wrote and produced himself entirely, but it is something for this heavily-anticipated film mostly lacking in hard details.

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Photos: NYTimes Magazine Features Pretty Breakthrough Performances Shots By Ryan McGinley

So this weekends New York Times magazine has its annual Oscar-themed photo issue and year it's a "Breakthrough Performances on Film" photo spread shot by VICE magazine chum Ryan McGinley, whose raw, confessional-styled amateur snaps finally seems to be resembling the quality of real photographers.

Arty shots of current "breakthrough" actors include Seth Rogen, Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Sienna Miller, Marion Cotillard, Paul Dano, Julie Christie, Jennifer Jason-Leigh (this photo is admittedly amazing) and more.

The magazine-scanning keeners at OhNowTheyDidn't have them all. Read more...

Noah Baumbach's 'Margot At The Wedding': Emotional Violence At Its Best

While we're encouraging you to not go to films, how about we be positive for once? The New York Times has an excellent feature on the bitingly funny and trenchantly painful new Noah Baumbach film, "Margot At The Wedding" which stars Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason-Leigh, Jack Black and is one of our favorite films of the year so far (our review).

It's about two sisters - one who is a neurotic, mean spirited, and exasperatingly critical and difficult (Kidman in a daring, tour de force performance), and one a free-spirited bohemian (an always-amazing Jason-Leigh) who is getting a married to an underachieving schlub (Black). The tightly-wound Kidman, who is a semi-celebrated New York author (totally vampiric, she leeches stories from her sisters dramas to fuel her books) isn't having it and when her and her 11-year-old son come to visit Pauline (Leigh) for the wedding, she does everything in her narcissistic power to dissuade her sister from going through with the marriage.

It gets really ugly and really funny from there. The Times speaks of it's "emotional violence" and lord if that's not dead-on. It's a film that's hard to watch at times, but it's humor and pain dichotomy is amazingly caustic, bittersweet and honest.

We digress, the interview with the players. Everyone always assumes Baumbach's family films (see "The Squid & The Whale") are autobiographical and this tends to get on his nerves after a while. Like any good writer, if and when he does mine his personal life for story elements, he utilizes them as a launching pad for his imagination. “If I’m using something that’s familiar or from my life, it’s only to ground me so I can invent off of that.”

But critics still insist. “Someone would ask me if something was true, and I’d say no, and then they’d ask me a follow-up question under the assumption that it was true,” Baumbach told the Times. “I’d get tripped up answering a question about my real father based on something in the movie that wasn’t real.”

There's actually one scene in 'Margot' that the writer/director wrote as a response to this critical presumptuousness.

Margot, a fiction writer in the throes of a personal crisis, is at a bookstore appearance, which goes quickly awry when her interviewer presses her on the connections between her life and her work. He brings up a story of hers that concerns an abusive patriarch. She immediately begins to defend her father. He interrupts: What he meant to ask was whether she had based that monstrous figure on herself.

“I was having fun with what people assume when they think something is autobiographical,” Baumbach said.

Some critics that the characters (especially Kidman's) are too dislikable and they're right, she's one of the most monstrous mothers seen onscreen in recent memory with a vicious tongue, but that's sort of the whole point of the film.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not liking her,” Baumbach said. “That you understand her is what’s important."

“It’s a family where if you show your belly, people are going to pounce,” he added. "And no one pounces as often or as recklessly as Margot, a seething bundle of anger and self-loathing who swings unpredictably between aggressive and passive-aggressive attacks."

There's a lot of nods to French newish-waver Eric Rohmer too (we recommend his Criterion boxset).

Mr. Baumbach has never been shy about his Francophilia — “Squid” nods to Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Eustache and Louis Malle — and the on-the-fly immediacy of “Margot” owes something to the French New Wave house style, “the way they allowed for rough edges,” he said. Eric Rohmer’s “vacation movies,” he acknowledged, were an inspiration for “Margot.” The film’s title and the name of Ms. Leigh’s character pay dutiful homage to Mr. Rohmer’s “Pauline at the Beach.”

One review we read which we can't remember offhand (maybe it's the Times one?) basically said (and we're paraphrasing), the film had a dreading, almost "anxiety-provoking" quality to it and it does, but it's thrilling in a way that you feel like you're peering through the window of a real family dinner go totally haywire. It's really incredible how Baumbach captures this so we authentically, not to mention how he writes so well for the female voice.

Baumbach's next three projects include writing with Wes Anderson again (co-writing an animated version of Roald Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox”) and he's been hired to write an adaptation of “The Emperor’s Children,” a NewYork literati piece for Ron Howard (yeah, we know, disturbing, right?) and then another, untitled original screenplay that will again star his wife Jennifer Jason-Leigh which he hopes to direct next year. "At some point it’s going to add up to some sort of strange police blotter sketch if all these things in my films are true,” he said. “My hope is that I will make enough movies that they can’t all conceivably be autobiographical.”

"Margot At The Wedding" opens up in limited release this weekend. We can't recommend it highly enough (we'll probably go see it again). Oh and lest we forget, the soundtrack is excellent and with lots of tastefully chosen tunes by Fleetwood Mac (actually that one's just in the movie), Dinosaur Jr., Donovan, the dbs, Blondie and more.
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Margot At The Wedding: Families Behaving Badly

Our belated New York Film Festival review.

We've been rooting for Noah Baumbach for years. Most of his early films were extremely clever and droll, but problematic (though"The Squid & The Whale" is pretty fantastic), yet even when he's fallen flat ("Mr. Jealousy"), he's always showcased a mountain full of promise.

Early reports for his 5th feature "Margot At The Wedding" were mixed and that got us a little worried.

The story of 'Margot' is about two sisters and their incredibly dysfunctional family and relationship. The sisters are estranged, but Margot (Nicole Kidman), an semi-successful and uptight Manhattan author, comes up to visit her bohemian and freespirited sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason-Leigh) who's getting married at, and currently living in their old parents Hamptons-era house.

The problem is that Pauline is getting married to a less-than-impressive loser shlub named Malcolm (Jack Black) and not only does Margot disapprove, she basically does everything in her power to try and convince her sister from going through with the wedding. And thus the story begins.

But rather than stock, dysfunctional family comedy, 'Margot' gets deep, raw and straight to the bone with realness. The script and characters are mean-spirited and brutal, the characters pull no punches and the film is painfully funny and painfully emotional.

Baumbach's always had a flair for sharp dialogue, witty repartee and mixing awkward observational humor with smarty pants references and painful moments (think Jeff Daniel's heart attack scene in "Squid & The Whale": "Don't you remember the last line of Godard's "A Bout De Souffle"? Belmondo calls Seberg a bitch. 'Degolas.' We saw it at the Thalia with the Dicksteins. I got you in for the children's price. You were pregnant with Walt."), here his knack for female behavior and sisterly friction is uncanny.

The sisters betray one another, bare family secrets, thrash at their relationship, rivalries and old wounds yet still laugh deeply and warmly together and the refrain from both of them is "she's my best friend," is both very real and very ironic. These contradictions, juxtaposition, these sticky and complicated interactions are what make Baumbach's film feel so alive and so very real. We had that painful gut reaction to the best and worst times of visiting your family on a disastrous, but semi-enjoyable weekend - much like most families are.

There's some near-excruciating scenes, Margot's character is so cruel in moments, but it's as viciously funny as it is emotionally hard to watch sometimes.

John Turturro does a brief cameo as Margot's estranged husband and the film is near note-perfect outside of Jack Black who is a little miscast and falls into the trap of being "Jack Black" at times (interestingly enough, it is Black who sought out Baumbach for a role in this film).

Visually and cinematically the film is assured and has no traces of the flat direction of Baumbach's early, learning-on-the-job films, that were well-written, but bland cinematically (the swimming scene here is one of his best so far). The grayish, blue naturally-lighting look of the film does give off shades Bergman and though he's much more vicious and less goofy then Woody Allen, perhaps Baumbach has become the heir apparent to the affluent, and educated New York screenwriting voice.

Musically there's not much that you're going to notice within the film, but the folky soundtrack itself is rather fantastic (just pretty subtle throughout). There are a few musical moments though; Kidman's son awkwardly singing Blondie's "Sunday's Girl" in a girlish falsetto when he thinks no one is noticing; an exchange about old records they haven't heard in years between Jason-Leigh and Kidman that references King Crimson*, the Pixies, REM and X. Jack Black's character mentions he once played with Ric Ocasek and even drops a stoner memory loss reference ("I can't remember the name of Motley Crue's bassist. Wait, Mick Mars!"), but don't be worried, the film is not cluttered with lame pop culture references. The only songs prominently heard are Fleetwood Mac's "That's All for Everyone" and Karen Dalton's excellent and bittersweet, "Something On Your Mind" that closes out the film.

In a perfect world, Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason-Leigh and Baumbach's screenplay are all going to score Oscar nominations, but this isn't a perfect world and many people are already complaining about the film's meanspiritedness; many are just finding this film too dark for some reason.

Bitter, trenchant, biting, funny and melancholy, "Margot At The Wedding" is not only fantastic, it's one of our favorite films of the year. [A+]

This excellent Jorma Kaukonen song "Genesis" used in the film really sums our feelings afterwards; it's really bittersweet. PS you can download the 'Margot' screenplay for free and legally within this post. *Of note, King Crimson's Robert Fripp noted on his blog on his blog a few months back that a KC track was requested for licensing by Baumbach. We've noted the Crimson album reference, but honestly can't say whether we heard a track in the film (they're certainly not on the soundtrack disc).
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