Synecdoche, NY

An image of myself in college is of a young man: wearing black (always black), wandering through the rain dwelling on/in isolation, alienation, melancholy. It was in college that I read Hesse’s Demian and understood it, really understood it, I thought. As a French major, I read Proust; I read Camus and Sartre; I remember how the first line of L’etranger (Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas/ Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I don’t know.) struck me with its morbid simplicity. The moral of Huis Clos/No Exit  (L’enfer, ce’’est l’autre/Hell is other people)  became a constant refrain. I was the young existentialist. I called myself Meursault. I wrote. That was a long time ago.

Synecdoche, New York (set in Schenectady, New York) reminded me of all that, brought it back with an unexpected force. I can’t say much about this film on one viewing.  I had wondered if Charlie Kaufman could be as good a director as he is a writer, or whether he would get carried away, unable to edit his own work. He does a good job, especially considering the subject matter is a playwright who can’t stop constructing his play. The movie is about – well, it’s about a lot of things – but the plot involves a play that gets so big that it becomes as large as the city  in which it is set. The characters change everyday, playing themselves and each other. The playwright (Philip Seymour Hoffman) finds someone to play him, and the actors and characters multiply and slide and blend together in unexpected and unexplainable ways. The play ends up taking place over some 30 or 40 years, and, as is common with Kaufman’s work (think Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), inside and outside get so confused that the distinction no longer makes sense.

The title of the film is relevant. Even as the play becomes as big as that which it represents, each character stands in for the whole. There is a telling moment near the end, when a relatively new character gets introduced, and although she is new, I found myself identifying with her and feeling profoundly sad at her story. That’s when I realized that all the rest of the characters, and the characters’ characters, were meant to build to this moment. This woman, Ellen, is the focal point through which we understand the rest of the movie. Even amidst all the isolation and longing and heartbreak, there is the sense that each person’s story is important, which is at once heartening and devastating.

I’m not going to lie. There were moments in this film where I wondered when it was finally going to end. It is beautiful and literate and witty. It deliriously plays with language. But it seems long, and I suspect that is part of its effectiveness. The story takes place over a long time, and it takes a certain slow pace to get the audience to the point of realizing that even the tiniest, most absurd moments are part of the plot, of all the plots of all our lives. And there is a certain universality in the radical particularity he depicts, and this universality crystallizes for Kaufman, for the Existentialists, for all of us, in death.