Synecdoche, NY
10/12/08 11:01![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyCharlie Kaufman was on Colbert, and that reminded me that I wanted to write something about his latest movie, Synecdoche New York, which I saw last month. This is a thoughtful review, and while I agree with all of it I don't think it quite captures what was good and important in this movie beyond its cleverness.
I've seen most of Kaufman's movies, and I haven't regretted any of them, but I only genuinely loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I rather liked Adaptation, but Eternal Sunshine is the only one of his movies, to my mind, that transcended Kaufman's basic theme of "We're all terrible people." Kaufman has a lot of really good, really important ideas, and one of his strengths as a writer is that he's so good at not shying away from the terrible things that people do to themselves and each other, but he falters when he mistakes his own misanthropy for a good, important idea.
I honestly loved how Synechdoche explored the (often self-destructive) ways that we analyze and narrate and represent the world and our lives. There's a wonderful bit where the main character's young daughter is narrating their imaginative play, in the way that young children do - "You're going to play THIS role, and you're going to do THIS, and then THIS happens, and then..." - and that's a theme that gets repeated over and over in the movie: we're trying to build up these narratives around our lives, and force some meaning upon our lives, and the more we build up these levels of analysis and representation, we fall into this world that's solipsistic and self-centered and without any point of connection either to the real world or to other people. So -- if the movie, too, falls into these solipsistic layers, maybe that's entirely to the point. And I WANT to love a movie that talks about these themes. But ultimately my gut-level reaction is, in Meaghan's words, "Buh?"
I've seen most of Kaufman's movies, and I haven't regretted any of them, but I only genuinely loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I rather liked Adaptation, but Eternal Sunshine is the only one of his movies, to my mind, that transcended Kaufman's basic theme of "We're all terrible people." Kaufman has a lot of really good, really important ideas, and one of his strengths as a writer is that he's so good at not shying away from the terrible things that people do to themselves and each other, but he falters when he mistakes his own misanthropy for a good, important idea.
I honestly loved how Synechdoche explored the (often self-destructive) ways that we analyze and narrate and represent the world and our lives. There's a wonderful bit where the main character's young daughter is narrating their imaginative play, in the way that young children do - "You're going to play THIS role, and you're going to do THIS, and then THIS happens, and then..." - and that's a theme that gets repeated over and over in the movie: we're trying to build up these narratives around our lives, and force some meaning upon our lives, and the more we build up these levels of analysis and representation, we fall into this world that's solipsistic and self-centered and without any point of connection either to the real world or to other people. So -- if the movie, too, falls into these solipsistic layers, maybe that's entirely to the point. And I WANT to love a movie that talks about these themes. But ultimately my gut-level reaction is, in Meaghan's words, "Buh?"