In the previous four instances of this series, I spent a lot of time talking about the ways the movie(s) I watched that month related to other movies written or directed by Charlie Kaufman.
This month, when taking notes, I found myself just writing down a lot of snippets of rich and meaningful dialogue. That's certainly an equally valid way of "thinking" about Kaufman.
I'll still do a little talking about how this film fits into Kaufman's body of work, but I may not concentrate on a bunch of superficial (yet still interesting) similarities between Synecdoche, New York and other Kaufman films. You could easily argue that Kaufman reveals himself most in the superficial details, but you could just as easily argue that nothing in a Kaufman movie is accurately described as "superficial," since he has clearly done so much thinking about every minute piece of the puzzle.
The film it reminds me of most is, it probably goes without saying, Adaptation. Kaufman was literally a character in that film, and Caden Cotard, the main character in this film (played by the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman), is the character most clearly a direct analogue for Kaufman among his rich collection of characters. But the similarity presents itself most in a phenomenon I described in the opening sentence of my review of Adaptation for AllMovie nearly 20 years ago:
"Critics charged with the divine headache of describing Adaptation, in all its twisted magnificence, should find it appropriate that the story concentrates on the paralysis of writer's block, brought on by the impossible urge to say everything."
Synecdoche, New York is chock full of that impossible urge, and it is a divine headache indeed. If a 300-word review of Adaptation was insufficient to tackle its many complexities -- that was the word length I was writing back then, for the princely sum of $20 a pop -- then I have no idea what I would have done with a similar length allotment for Synecdoche. Fortunately, I didn't see that movie until after I stopped writing for AllMovie.
In fact, it was only just after I stopped writing -- like, one week later. That wasn't in 2008 when Synecdoche came out though. To give you some indication how different my movie viewing was back then, I didn't see this movie until Thanksgiving of 2011, November 21st to be exact. Only one week earlier, I had watched Sorry, Thanks, the last movie I ever reviewed for AllMovie. (I didn't stop out of choice; they changed their financial model to stop using freelancers.)
The timing of my first viewing of Synecdoche, New York is interesting for a couple reasons. For one, it is absolutely unimaginable to me that I could have let three years elapse before getting around to watching it. Not with Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind both having claimed my #1 spot for their respective years. I lose that much trust in Kaufman just one film later, just because I don't really like how the trailer looks and some people say they didn't get it? What a fool I was.
But then there was the timing of what was going on in my life, and this is something that is only just occurring to me now. When I wrote that review of Sorry, Thanks, that was my last paying review gig -- to date. Six weeks from now, that will be ten years ago. Sure, I say I get paid, in a manner of speaking, for the reviews I currently write because I have a critics card that gets me into screenings for free ... when there isn't a pandemic on, anyway. But actually receiving direct compensation for the work that I consider my passion? Hasn't happened in ten years.
And I'm pretty sure I had that existential pit in my stomach when I watched Synecdoche just a week after filing my last review for AllMovie. I surely knew that the film criticism industry was changing, and that the chances of me getting paying work as a critic again were slim to none. So a movie that does a deep dive into the idea of your life passing you by, of measuring your accomplishments and the accomplishments you are still likely to make in the future, would have resonated with me quite a bit at the time. Even if I didn't consciously realize it until now.
But Synedoche, New York is about so much more than that. It might take me 10,000 words to talk about the things it's about. But hopefully you've already seen it, so you already know.
So instead of doing the rigorous comparisons between movies to isolate similar themes -- you know, what's been the bread and butter of this series -- I'm just going to finish with the string of quotes/exchanges that I jotted down from Synecdoche, which in and of themselves reminded me of Kaufman's entire body of work. Even those that might require explanation, I will just leave to you to sort through.
Forthwith:
"It's been a year."
"It's been a week!"
"The murky, cowardly depths of my fucked up being."
"It's about everything. Dating, birth, death, life, family. All of that."
"I'm fun."
"Oh sweetie no you're not."
"You wish you were a girl?"
"I think I would have been better at it."
"It's a drag in a lot of ways."
"I'm aching for it to be over. The end is built into the beginning."
"There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make. You destroy your life every time you choose. But you may not know it for 20 years. And you may not ever trace it to its source. And you only get once chance to play it out."
"No one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own."
"Everyone is disappointing, the more you know someone."
"This is everyone's experience, the details hardly matter. You are everyone."
"As you learn there is no one watching, and there never was."
"I know how to do the play now."
That's pretty much the last thing Caden says in the movie, though it's at least the third time he's said it. He's got his head on the shoulder of the actress who plays the mother in the dream of Ellen the cleaning woman, who as far as I can tell is a character Caden never even met. He either heard of her or just made her up. That's how deep the rabbit hole goes.
After that, Dianne Wiest, the director in his earpiece, gives him a final stage direction that I only properly understood on this third viewing:
"Die."
Caden complies.
This series will die, so to speak, after one more installment in November, when I watch Anomalisa for only the second time.
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