The film, Kaufman's directorial debut, concerns Caden Cotard, as played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is the director at a regional theatre in Schenectady, New York which is putting on Death of a Salesman. Caden has decided to make an artistic statement by casting young actors in the well-worn story. We are introduced to our protagonist as he wakes up one morning and sits at the edge of the bed staring at the sickly visage in a nearby mirror. This scene is perhaps a synecdoche for the film itself as Caden goes on to see his life as through a play, darkly.
Meanwhile Mrs. Cotard, a.k.a – Adele Lack, is helping their 4 four-year old in the bathroom which begins the film's brief flirtation with bodily fluids and excretions. Just after this, as Cotard shaves, a freak plumbing accident sends part of a sink fixture into his head. A visit to the doctor for stitches begins a series of unfavorable diagnoses. To make matters worse, it is soon revealed that Adele and Caden are virtual strangers living under the same roof. Adele decides not to attend the premiere of Caden's production, ostensibly to work on her own artistic endeavor which is painting nearly microscopic pictures, and eventually announces her intention to go to Berlin with their daughter but without him for the opening of a show featuring her work.
With a marriage in shambles and a new malady afflicting him everyday, Caden warms to the flirtations of his theatre's box office secretary, Hazel, but the resulting encounter doesn't go quite as he would have hoped. Having hit the bottom, he gains respite when he is awarded a generous MacArthur Foundation grant to help him pursue his artistic whims. He decides to produce a play about his life that takes place in real time where the dramaturgical realm and Caden's "real life" become inexorably intertwined in a Gordian knot.
At first I assumed that Caden's break with reality had a fairly clear line of demarcation, like David Lynch gave us in Mulholland Drive (when Rita rushes home and looks into the blue box). Kaufman, however, has different ideas. I thought at first that poor Caden had lost it when he begins his epic act of solipsism. But, when I saw the actor who is cast as Caden in the play, I recognized him from the beginning of the film. You see the guy briefly in the scene where Caden goes outside to get the newspaper and the man is standing across the street. The man tells Caden that he is right for the part because he's been watching the director for years. So the whole story is one big delusion.
When I began this post, I noted the claustrophobia that the movie induced. This is mostly because of Frederick Elmes' cinematography. Elmes is no stranger to the surreal having shot David Lynch's Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Wild at Heart. Here he boxes Caden in and with him, we viewers. I think I can count the number of long shots in Synecdoche, New York on one hand. Establishing shots seem to confine Caden more than tell us where the action is. For instance, there's the scene at the restaurant where he's waiting for one of the actresses, Claire, to show up. We see Caden penned inside a corner booth instead of a shot of the restaurant letting us know to where the action has gone. In addition, Elmes favored long lenses which means shots have little, if any, depth of field. Most of the film has the characters or their faces taking up the bulk of the frame with the background out of focus. There is a lot of shot-reverse-shot and you rarely, if ever, see the shoulder or any part of a character's interlocutor. As a result everyone seems isolated in their little realm of focus. These techniques made me feel like I was trapped in the story, doomed to watch the characters' problems unfold before me.
Kaufman weaves a very dense tapestry here which includes a love story, some dark comedy, as well as a dose of absurdity illustrated by Hazel's house which is perpetually in flames. There's also a motif concerning the female body which seems to preface trouble for Caden. Adele's micropaintings are of female nudes and they are the proximate cause for defection to Germany; Olive, Adele and Caden's daughter, grows into a body covered in tattoos and seeing a picture of her pubescent form laden with ink on the cover of a magazine sends Caden into a fit whose denouement is his realization that he has lost his daughter; there are two scenes, one with Hazel and the other with Adele's friend Maria, which are shot from a high angle giving the viewer a pukka glimpse at some extensive cleavage. Caden has a relationship with Hazel that goes sour while Maria proves to be behind Olive's tattoos. We see Claire in a top which barely covers her breasts and Caden goes on to have an unsuccessful relationship with her. This is all rounded off with the sight of Tammy's breasts, she being the actress playing Adele in Caden's epic, as she seduces Caden.
There is a scene at the beginning of the film in which Adele is with Olive, Caden and Adele's daughter, in the bathroom as the girl sits on the commode. Most of it is a medium shot in which both characters are in the frame. However, there is a brief cut to a shot from Adele's POV where she looks at Olive's hands which are stacked one atop the other on the front of the toilet seat between her legs. When I saw it, I had no idea why it should have been included. By the end of the film, I still didn't understand. Perhaps her green bowel movement is meant to preface Caden's impending health problems.
Ultimately Synecdoche, New York is a jumble of dead ends, loose ends, and questions without answers not unlike life itself. It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside and enigma which takes Shakespeare's adage that all the world is a stage to heart. And it's also a helluva lot of fun to try and piece the puzzle together.
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