Synecdoche, New York

I mentioned at the beginning of October how TCM is running their Two For One programming feature they first ran in the spring, and how I recorded several of the movies. Now that the series is being rerun I can do posts on all those movies. We are now up to Synecdoche, New York, airing tonight (Nov. 9) at 10:30 PM.

Philip Seymour Hoffman Caden Cotard, and as the movie opens it's the first day of autumn, although time changes very quickly as the movie goes on. I could swear I saw a newspaper dated 2005 in the opening scenes, although based on the age of Caden's daughter in that opening scene and her age later, it would have to be a good 10 years earlier. But part of the conceit of the movie is that it always makes it uncertain what time it really is. (Caden also addresses a package to Berlin with a pre-unification German postcode later in the movie, for example.)

Anyhow, in the opening, Caden is a drama professor at Union College in Schenectady, NY, living with his first wife Adele and their four-year-old daughter Olivia. A pipe in the bathroom goes haywire, hitting Caden in the forehead and sending him to the emergency room, where they eventually suggest he seen a neurologist, who won't tell him what's really wrong with him and whether he's got a terminal condition. But he's determined not to let this stop him from producing Death of a Salesman.

At some point along the way, Adele divorces Caden and takes Olivia to Berlin. Adele becomes a successful visual artist there, while Olivia falls under the spell of a woman who has her get a bunch of tattoos and become a performance artist. If none of this makes any sense, well, as I said, the film plays with time and has a decidedly non-linear story. Caden, meanwhile, starts seeing Hazel, who works at the box office and buys a house that's constantly on fire. (See what I said above about none of this making sense.

Caden's production of Death of a Salesman gets noticed by some people in high spaces, as Caden eventually receives a letter from the MacArthur Foundation informing him that he's been named one of their "fellows" for the next year, receiving what is commonly known as a "genius grant" to be paid out in 20 quarterly installments. There are no strings on a MacArthur fellowship. With this in mind, Caden sets out to write the great American play.

And the play is going to be big in scope, as Caden goes down to New York City and rents a dilapidated warehouse to stage a free-form play about real life. But is this really a play? Events in the attempt to complete writing of the play, which never seems to have an audience and never seems to get done, increasingly get mixed up with the things going on in Caden's real life, such as trying to find Olive after all these years. One begins to wonder whether Caden is going crazy, and whether any of the events in the movie are or were real, or all just figments of Caden's imagination.

In the TCM introduction, Ben Mankiewicz and his guest Patty Jenkins talk about how Synecdoche, New York really divided critics and will divide viewers too. Some think it's great, while others think it's a bunch of stuff that doesn't make any sense put together, even if that's part of the point. I have to say I tend toward the latter view. The plot, if there even is any, didn't work for me, and if the movie is just supposed to be the presentation of insanity, well, I just didn't get it. As I sat down to write the review, I found myself thinking of Fight Club, another movie where a lot may just be figments of the main character's imagination, but a movie done in a way where it mostly works. Synecdoche, New York isn't like that at all, instead going for pretention claiming to be brilliance. Sorry, but it's not brilliant.