Where are you, Icarus?

Synecdoche, New York is not a film, it is a screenplay. Watching the film doesn’t feel like a cinematical experience, in fact the only thing justifying the fact that we are watching moving pictures and not reading a book is Philipp Seymour Hoffman. Kaufman’s first wrong decision is that he didn’t simply sit down and write a book. Had he done so, it would have been an admired work of literature; because where Kaufman lacks directorial skills he has enormous talent as a writer. The story he wrote wasn’t made for a film, but he should be applauded for trying it.

Caden Cotard is a theatre director, member of a self-idolizing artistic society, which fails to comprehend that it too is doomed to turn forty one day. Cotard is sick of them and their narcissistic tendencies and feels more and more alienated from this life as his wife and daughter run off to Berlin, symbol for all hypocritical eccentricity of this world. Kaufman continues to confront his hero with the pressure of achieving something to justify his sorry, wasted being, with the mourning over past relationships, with his grey hair. Cotards play becomes the stage for Kaufman’s exaggerated symbolism and his attempt to further the film’s meaning more and more until his card house collapses in itself and the film reaches the peak of absurdity. Kaufman has an Icarus complex; the film shares his mythological fate.

The issues brought up in this film aren’t new to cinema or literature. But unlike Kaufman, most individuals, who handled similar topics, knew where to stop: Brett Easton Ellis brilliantly shows his hero trying to blend into a society filled with pathetic narcissistic idiots, but he doesn’t try to expand the books meaning, doesn’t start involving a whole spectrum of innately human problems and hence, succeeds. Tarkovskiy might go further and show Andrey Rublevs struggle with his faith humanity and his doubts in the importance of his art and being, but then again he is Tarkovskij. Hence, he succeeds.

Kaufman doesn’t know where to stop, neither is he Tarkovskij. Hence, he can not succeed. He strives for perfection, for a film not only about aging and alienation and art, but about everything a human life can offer. About both dating and death, as Cotard ironically states. To adapt this kind of screenplay into an effective film it would have taken a genius of a director and Kaufman, a screenwriter directing his debut film simply is not. Can not be. Trying to tackle something this big as his first project is extremely courageous, but ultimately can not succeed.

Up to a certain point the film is an interesting and enjoyable attempt to turn an overly ambitious screenplay into a piece of cinema. But when the end comes closer, Kaufman can also not rid his film of some overly indie elements, I will try to avoid the word “cliché”. The scattered novels of his psychologist, one of them entitled “I’m not feeling to well today”. Or the priest at the final staged funeral, who predictably starts to swear while delivering a speech, that comes closest to being the film’s ‘message’. Or the final word spoken in the film, so unnecessary and frustrating…

Throughout the film Kaufman tries so hard to make it something unusual and unique that sadly the film becomes a product of the very overly-artsy society Kaufman tries to criticize. The equivalent of a tattooed four-year-old or a microscopic painting of a naked old woman.
That is the film’s biggest tragedy.

Kaufman is an amazingly talented screenwriter. I look forward to whatever he does next. Synecdoche New York is one of the most ambitious film projects I recall to have seen in a long time. There is no middle ground for this film. If it would have succeeded, if the director’s talent would have matched the screenwriter’s one, it would have been one of the best films ever made. The latter fact makes its failure a lot less tragic.