THE INTERIOR LIFE OF THE MIND

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

By Joel Johnson

Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman; cinematography by Frederick Elmes; edited by Robert Frazen; production design by Mark Friedberg; art direction by Adam Stockhausen; set decoration by Lydia Marks; costume design by Melissa Toth; music by Jon Brion

With: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis, Tom Noonan, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, and Sadie Goldstein. Running time: 124 minutes. Rated R for language and some sexual content/nudity

Charlie Kaufman’s film Synecdoche, New York is an impressive achievement in showing the thought process of a man hurtling through life profoundly aware of, and even more profoundly discomfited by, his own mortality. He is consumed by an array of symptoms that he sees as threats to his very life and the sense that his life will be bereft of meaning if he cannot do something memorable. That Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is also a writer and a dramatist adds layers of complexity to the film’s exploration of these issues.

Kaufman has written scripts for several films (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) in which he explored the inner life of the mind and produced alternative versions of the same person, but here Kaufman carries this to an extreme. He has his playwright character Caden interacting with the real people in his life and then creating versions of these people for a massive theater project that he is working on courtesy of a MacArthur grant. He creates an entire city—the titular Synedoche, NewYork—in a huge airplane hangarlike building, peopling it with what appears to be a cast of thousands. The creation of an interior cityscape was one of several challenges facing the film’s production design, art direction, and set decoration team. Caden’s cast includes a different version of himself and various other characters in his life—most notably the women that he has loved and/or who have loved him. Caden is perpetually overwhelmed by a sense of failure. His relationships repeatedly crash and burn. Caden and his alter ego say and do the things that expose the true feelings and motives of his character. This truth is not pretty. He is not totally unsympathetic, but he is not all that likable either. He has to cast and then recast his play as characters come and go, and the actors who play them leave the production—in disgust or despair. Will his play ever be finished? One actor wonders when the play will be performed since it has been in rehearsal for seventeen years. This was about halfway through the movie, if one is trying to gauge a timeline.

The film begins with considerable humor—much of it captured in the film’s trailer—in which Caden copes with a cascade of health problems at the same time that he senses the impending abandonment of his wife, Adele (Catherine Keener), and young daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein). Unfortunately, this strain of humor is unable to be maintained throughout the film. The film is primarily devoted to the gargantuan neuroses of the main character as he goes through life from a young man to an old one—kudos to the make-up crew who show not only Caden’s aging but also other characters such as Hazel (Samantha Morton) and Sammy (Tom Noonan)—and this intense degree of navel-gazing soon becomes incredibly tedious and depressing. Still, it explores the meaning of life from the inside out and is laden with symbolism—some obvious and others much less so. The average popcorn-chomping filmgoer may be bewildered, bored, and yearn for escape, but aspiring film students and screenwriters will likely find this a touchstone film for its capacity to bring that interior life of the mind—impassable territory for most filmmakers—to the cinema.