It’s not often that two monumental works of art fall in your lap within 24 hours (unless you’re a clumsy custodian at the Louvre), but something like that happened to me last week when I picked up Bob Dylan’s Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8 the night before attending a screening of Synecdoche, New York. Other than this coincidence of timing, the two wouldn’t appear to have much to do with each other. The former is just a collection of outtakes in much the same way Moby Dick is just a fishing story, from an artist who has nothing left to prove but keeps proving it anyway. The latter is the most ambitious, challenging, frustrating and thrilling American movie since I’m Not There, which happened to be about Bob Dylan (see, it all comes full circle) – maybe even since Mulholland Drive. Those two films are good points of reference, actually; if you hated them both, Synecdoche probably isn’t a movie for you.
Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut shares with those movies a dreamworld logic, puzzle-like narrative, identity confusion and a filmmaking intelligence engaged with the material on a sub-atomic level. In each case I walked out of the theater feeling as if I was setting foot on a different world than the one I’d left two hours earlier. Some of the same qualities can be found in Tell Tale Signs, which has something else in common with Synecdoche: The specter of death looms large over many of the Dylan tracks – and permeates every frame of Kaufman’s film. Most American movies are comfort food, but not this one; it offers only the comfort of knowing we’re not alone in our own existential confusion.
If it seems like I’m putting off the plot summary, well, it’s sort of like John McCain’s debate line about nailing jello to a wall. Philip Seymour Hoffman is Caden Cotard, a theater director in Schenectady, New York. Caden would seem to have it all: a fulfilling career (his production of Death of a Salesman has won praise for the innovative casting of young actors as old people), a wife, Adele (Catherine Keener), who is herself an accomplished artist, and an adorable four-year-old daughter Olive. Yet Caden exudes morbid dissatisfaction; when he opens the morning paper, he goes straight for the obituaries, and his health is deteriorating under the weight of numerous mysterious ailments. Soon it’s all falling apart. Adele decamps to Berlin for an art show, taking Olive with her, and seems unlikely ever to return. Time is slipping through Caden’s fingers, with months and even years passing in the blink of an eye. It’s time to make a statement – to leave a legacy.
Caden uses a genius grant to construct a massive set inside a New York City warehouse, where he will stage the most ambitious theatrical work ever conceived. The project never receives a proper title – Caden considers Simulacrum but not, to our knowledge, Synecdoche – but it sprawls on for many blocks and many years as Caden struggles to get a handle on it. Since he is compelled to put everything into the production, he needs to find someone to play himself, as well as his assistant and one-time lover Hazel (Samantha Morton). He casts Sammy (Tom Noonan), who has been following him for 20 years and thus already knows everything about him, and Tammy (Emily Watson), with whom he is soon having an affair. The production becomes even more complicated – and the line between artifice and reality further blurred –when, eventually, he must cast actors to play both Sammy and Tammy.
It sounds confusing, but I haven’t even scratched the surface. (It was especially confusing for me as I tend to mix up Samantha Morton and Emily Watson anyway.) For instance, what to make of the absurdist touches, ranging from green poop to a house perpetually on fire? One viewing hardly seems adequate, given the narrative and thematic layers upon layers. Yet Synecdoche, New York is not just an intellectual exercise or postmodern mind game. It’s clear that Caden is, on some level, a synecdoche for Kaufman, and that his would-be masterpiece wrestling with all the great questions finds its real-life equivalent in the movie we’re watching. (The major difference being that Kaufman actually finished his version.) But as frustrating and opaque as Synecdoche can sometimes be, its emotional impact is undeniable. Heartbreak, sorrow, dread and regret…these are not the ingredients of the feel-good movie of the year – just the best one.
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