The Charlie Kaufman film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is currently my favorite, moving ahead of Albert Brooks' Defending Your Life.  His film Adaptation is also on my favorites list.  I have been a fan of Charlie Kaufman ever since I laughed my way through Being John Malkovich.  So when I first heard about this film moving into production, I was immediately interested.  My only trepidation was caused when I learned that Spike Jonze, who directed Adaptation, was not going to be associated with this film after all because he had signed on to direct Where the Wild Things Are instead.  Charlie Kaufman made the decision to step behind the camera and direct Synecdoche, New York himself – his first attampt.  And therein lie the problems with the film, as far as I can tell.

In a somewhat David Lynchian feel, the film follows the character of Caden Cotard (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman), a theater director who is finding his work unimportant and his marriage failing.  His wife (Catherine Keener) takes their daughter and goes to Germany for an exhibition of her microscopic paintings, leaving their relationship in question.  At the same time, after directing an uninspired adaptation of Death of a Salesman,    Caden finds he has been the recipient of a generous grant to produce honest work.  With that grant, he hopes to achieve something lasting and true, but has no clear vision of what that work will be; it is a work in progress.

In many ways portions of the film also remind of the Daniel Clowes comic book Eightball.  Caden is stricken with an odd nervous condition, removing his ability to salivate or cry.  Sores break out on his legs and face, but we see other repulsive sores on characters such as his therapist.  Time moves to and fro; Caden thinks that a week has passed, while we’re told a year has.  He hits it off with the box office girl (Samantha Morton) but after a guilt-covered failure in bed, the relationship dies.  Eventually he marries the female lead in Salesman (Michelle Williams) and begins work on this tremendous project: building the entire city of Schenectady within a warehouse, with every person within its walls part of his play. 

From here, the film begins taking dizzying turns and jumps.  Everyone has an actor playing them, including Caden (although in some cases the actor and the subject are one in the same).  Conversations jump from character to actor to everywhere in between.  Rooms, walls, and buildings rise and fall.  Caden’s condition gets worse, and better, as he and the actors spend years on this project.  Caden also longs to see his daughter Olive again, who he refers to as his “Real daughter” (despite having one with his second wife).  Through it all, there are some tremendous laughs, a lot of head scratching, and plenty of room to consider the vast themes Kaufman is touching on.

Unfortunately, in the hands of an experienced director, I believe the film would have found a much more profound focus.  I think 20 minutes should have been cut from the final print, defining and limiting some of the subject matter.  Without that, the film begins to drag badly two-thirds of the way through…which, perhaps, it is meant to do.  Because clearly a large part of the film is a metaphor for life itself: life is always a work in progress.  We look for meaning, but often find none.  We wish for a director to tell us what to say and what to do.  Even emotional moments can seem fake and contrived; being ourselves (and being true to ourselves) can be the most difficult task we will ever encounter.  So we put on the character we think we are supposed to play, and say and do the things we think we are meant to do.  We suffer terrible regret, and feel great pain when we believe we have disappointed those we care most about.  And then, just when we think we’ve figured something meaningful out, we die.

If you’re a bit unobservant, as I was, you won’t realize until after the film that the title is *NOT* Schenectady, New York.  Kaufman purposely uses synecdoche, which is a word that means using a part of something to refer to the whole (such as “a new set of wheels” to refer to a car), or the opposite, the whole of something to refer to a part (“use your head” instead of “brain”)…among other meanings.  Life is a stage, and each of us must play his part.  But despite what we may think, we are not special…this is not our movie or our play, it is a stage crowded by billions of actors, all playing the lead in their own production.  Too bad none of us really know what we’re doing, and only a few more understand the character they are playing.