Charlie Kaufman epitomizes 'quirky' and mostly I think he represents the good kinds of quirks. This is also true for Synecdoche, New York, a movie starting out as a quiet family drama about a marriage about to fall apart and an artist who agonizes over his lack of independent artistic vision but grows into a very idiosyncratic tale about the craving for control and self-involved hang-ups about identity. Actually, I think that Synecdoche, New York captures the problematic core in ideas about authenticity that can be found in for example the writings of Charles Taylor: the quest for authenticity plays out within an unhappy dialectic or tension between an attempt to find out who one really is and thinking about identity as a creation, an invention - what the movie shows is how these two aspect blend together in the melancholy worry that one is not somehow in control of one's own life.
I admit I lost track a few times, but that doesn't bother me - I will watch this again; both the form and the content are compelling. The form of depth in Synecdoche New York could have veered off into grad-student self-important musings about 'identity as construction' but luckily the film didn't quite go down that road.
The main person, a troubled playwright and director (oh no! not yet another film about a troubled artist, you might sigh, but hold on) is involved in this new project, some sort of story about his own life, and well, that story encompasses EVERYTHING - the meaning of life, reality, truth, identity, relations.... And so, one might say, does the film. The play starts out as one aspect of the director's neurotic life. The play is a mere idea, that is somehow to be realized. The location, a huge warehouse in New York, has been chosen, and it's here that the director is to form the perfect story about his own life. The actors play his friends and lovers, and himself. Months pass, years pass. The play remains at this preparatory stage while everyone become different people, while the director is at pains to pin down the story of his life. What the hell IS his life? This is the important question, a soul-searching one. Who am I? How do I related to other people? The director wants to tie it all together into a neat package, strictly defined roles and some sort of progression. But it goes out of hand, life can't be compartmentalized in that way.
If you've seen - and most probably you have - Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Being John Malkovich you know what kind of mind-bending adventure you are in for. These all share some themes, and does themes also re-surface in Synecdoche, New York: most of all, it's about compulsion and the way life is not definable in terms of identity. Kaufman transforms the heady material into a beautiful, hallucinatory and sad cinematic experience. All of it doesn't work, there are a couple of scenes that try to encapsulate the 'message' in the film in a too explicit way, but most of the time, the surprising editing, the way the story collapses and picks up again, and the good acting works magic with this fragmentary story about what happens when we age and when we re-consider our place in our own lives. I was also surprised at how emotionally involving it all was: the sadness felt real, a sadness that manages to have a sort of progression to some kind of clarity while at the same time a whole world crumbles.
No comments:
Post a Comment