Ambitious 'Synecdoche' questions life's very nature

By Robert Denerstein, Special To The News

Published November 13, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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Synecdoche, New York can be frustrating, beautiful, funny and ripe with melancholy, an overly inclusive movie that's trying to be about, well, almost everything.

I can't call it a complete success, but Synecdoche stayed with me in ways that most movies don't. It may help to think of it as the best David Lynch movie Lynch never made.

That's not meant as a slight but as a tip about the kind of open-endedness Kaufman brings to the screen. Baffling? Sometimes. Overly ambitious? Probably. But Synecdoche grapples with issues that obviously obsess and drive Kaufman, and that kind of lingering engagement gives the movie an artistic leg up on studio hack jobs in which every "i" is dotted and every "t" crossed.

Like most movies, Synecdoche has a main character, Caden Cotard, an upstate New York theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Unlike most movies, Synecdoche avoids straightforward presentation of its protagonist's story.

Kaufman treats time subjectively, which can throw you off balance. At one point, Cotard even seems to turn into someone else. Despite such mind games, the movie's targets remain clear.

Synecdoche deals with the way in which great plans rise, linger and come to naught. It watches as relationships are established and then quietly come apart. It understands how difficult it can be to escape the power of one's illusions. Kaufman tries to get to the marrow of Cotard's existence.

As the movie unfolds, two countervailing forces appear: an abiding feeling of sadness and a surprising stream of jokes. Both are indispensable to the telling of Kaufman's tale. I'm not sure - and maybe Kaufman himself isn't - which represents the more truthful expression of two simple facts: All of us live, and all of us die.

Synecdoche also is the kind of movie that gives actors a workout. Hoffman's fine as Cotard, a man who - from the movie's outset - is beset by all manner of physical decay, much of it displayed in pitiless fashion. Cotard doesn't seem to be living life; rather, it seems as if life is something that's happening to him.

Hoffman's accompanied by many equally strong companions, notably the women in Cotard's life: Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh and toward the end, a magnificent Dianne Wiest.

Look, it's possible that Kaufman should have waited to make this movie. At 40, he's a bit young for death-obsessed tales, and this one is awfully complicated for a first directorial outing. But Kaufman plunged ahead anyway. That makes Synecdoche as courageous as its title is unpronounceable, a movie with its own strange rhythms, all of them intended to capture the fractured, tormented and, yes, ridiculous way of things.

Synecdoche, New York

The impending death of a theater director

* Grade: A-

* Rated: R

* Running time: 124 minutes

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