Eye Candy #134 - "Synecdoche, New York"

Synecdoche, New York: I have enjoyed the films of Charlie Kaufmann in the past. I thought "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation" were unlike anything being made at the time and were excellent. I own "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". But with "Synecdoche" we get Kaufmann's first directorial effort. And I don't think it lives up to my expectations as set by the other films. Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a theater director with a crumbling life - his wife leaves him, his health is deteriorating, he can't find the daughter his wife absconded with, he's in love with multiple women but can't reciprocate to them because he's almost manically self-centered. He is given a MacArthur "genius" grant to develop a work and he decides to create a play about truth, which includes large swaths of his life, on sets built inside a giant warehouse with actors representing the people he encounters in his life, including his multiple lovers and even at least two different actors that play Caden himself. The play rehearses for YEARS (over 17, though the final year tally is never shared) to the point where most of the cast gives up or dies in the process. Kaufmann's films have always been idiosyncratic, but in "Synecdoche", there are too many different themes and ideas floating around that really only one of them (about Caden and the purpose/function of his life) has any space to elaborate upon. The rest are left to wither undeveloped. The passage in the time in the film is disjointed and confusing (he skips through his life fairly quickly, with literally months passing each minute), and it's overlong (over 2 hours). Sure, it kept my attention. Sure, there were some neat ideas. But someone needed to pull Kaufmann back with this one. It was okay, it was not great. Woodchuck sez, "Did not meet my expectations."