 | |
List Price: $28.96 | | Label: Sony Pictures
Salesrank: 4799
Released: March 10, 2009 |
| Our Price: $16.06 |
| Used Price: $2.28 |
|
MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
|
Editorial Review:
From Charlie Kaufman, comes a visual and philosophic adventure, Synechdoche, New York. As he did with his groundbreaking scripts for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman twists and subverts form and language as he delves into the mind of a man who, obsessed with his own mortality, sets out to construct a massive artistic enterprise that could give some meaning to his life. Theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is mounting a new play. His life catering to suburban blue-hairs at the local regional theater in Schenectady, New York is looking bleak. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) has left him to pursue her painting in Berlin, taking their young daughter Olive with her. His therapist, Madeleine Gravis (Hope Davis), is better at plugging her best-seller than she is at counseling him. A new relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel (Samantha Morton) has prematurely run aground. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one. Worried about the transience of his life, he leaves his home behind. He gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in New York City, hoping to create a work of brutal honesty. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a growing mockup of the city outside. The years rapidly fold into each other, and Caden buries himself deeper into his masterpiece, but the textured tangle of real and theatrical relationships blurs the line between the world of the play and that of Caden's own deteriorating reality.
Description of Synecdoche New York:
An insanely ambitious, dazzling, maddening movie, Synecdoche, NY is the directorial debut of Charlie Kaufman, the inspired screenwriter of twisty, mind-bending movies like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation., and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Broadly summarized, it's about a director named Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who, after his wife leaves him, sets out to create a theater production that will mirror all of life in New York City by literally recreating the city inside of a gigantic warehouse--including versions of his lover, his new wife, and himself, who become so entrenched in his life that eventually there must also be doubles of these doubles... which only describes a fragment of the intertwining storylines. At points even the most attentive viewers may feel confused by the sheer abundance and density of ideas and narrative threads, as the movie veers from mundanity to an exaggerated but not impossible reality to sheer surrealism. But by the end, though the movie folds in on itself multiple times and tries to encompass more of life than any movie can coherently contain, Synecdoche, NY comes to a remarkably full and resonant conclusion. Think of it as Kaufman's version of 8 1/2, another movie about creativity and a conflicted psyche. Hoffman's performance, solid but difficult to empathize with, is balanced by dozens of vivid characters played by an astonishing cast, including Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Hope Davis, Michelle Williams, Dianne Wiest, Emily Watson, and more. Sprawling, flawed, both intimate and epic, Synecdoche, NY is a unique and impressive achievement that will reward (and perhaps even demands) multiple viewings. --Bret Fetzer
Stills from Synecdoche, New York (click for larger image)
Synecdoche New York Reviews:
One of the best movies of all time 
2009-11-01 - "Synecdoche, New York" is a true artistic masterpiece. It is a very profound work of genius. Thank you so very much, Charlie Kaufman.
Almost, almost intolerably heavy-handed. 
2009-10-31 - From a straightforward approach, it seems to make the mistake of trying to make sense out of chaos by saying that it doesn't make any sense.
Still, I might almost call the film self-loathing, which begs me to consider it more as film criticism than simply just a 'film.' It's almost if the trappings of film are set up as a lab-rat style maze with no solution and 'Humanity' is dropped into the mess and cursed with trying to find a way out.
If I were to go so far as to say the glass is half-full with this film, and I'm not sure that it is, I'd say that it's a pioneer in a whole new genre, which might be aptly termed "The Epic Short." The film seems to have about a ten, perhaps fifteen minute attention span, and nothing seems to internally recall anything beyond it.
It's just that I'm just not sure that actually making this film was a good idea. While any of this may sound great in theory or on paper, the film itself, for me, loses all novelty and the very basic quality of watchability really quickly.
So, yes, I hated it, and I'm pretty sure I was supposed to--but without any of the guilty pleasures of entertainment, I found it lacking hooks.
WHY NOT TITLE IT "SUPPURATION, NY"? 
2009-09-26 - "Synecdoche," as some people may recall from their freshman high school English classes on poetry, is a figure of speech where a part of something stands for the whole (or vice versa): e.g., "We hired ten hands" (meaning "ten people").
Apparently this confused and confusing film is in some way meant to seem (A) deep and very intellectual and (B) like a metaphor (or figure of speech) for "Life" (with a capital "L").
Also (apparently) its main character is suffering from different shades and degrees of mental illness throughout most of it, so that neither he nor the audience of the film has a clear idea of what is REALLY REAL vs. what is surreal or symptomatic of a disturbed person's perceptions.
Do you recall the "fantasy" scenes of Diane Keaton's character in LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR? Or the drug-trips in YOUNG GUNS? Or the schizophrenic delusions of John Nash in A BEAUTIFUL MIND? Those are crystal clear to us, compared to many of the scenes in this film.
Do you enjoy reading the novels and short stories of Franz Kafka? Or the fiction and drama of Samuel Beckett? At least with them, we can find intelligent and intelligible meaning.
My impression of this film is that it is pretentious, pseudo-intellectual suppuration, whose point could have been made in fifteen minutes or less. Throughout this long, painful film, I was deeply saddened to see so many fine actors wasted.
If I were only allotted seven words for this review, I would have written, THIS EMPEROR IS NOT WEARING ANY CLOTHES.
Nuke a [...]whale for jesus
2009-09-23 - [...]
For a film with so distinguished a writer and cast I actually have nothing good to say about this movie and that is a shock even to me. If you want to be a jerk and buy this anyways to defy reason I say go for it. You'll have wasted some money and lost 3 hours of your life you could have used on your death bed to tell your family you love them, and now they will never know.
Labyrinth of the mind a surreal odyssey 
2009-09-17 - "Synecdoche, New York" represents a world that lies somewhere between fantasy and reality. An ailing director, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) builds a replica of New York in a huge cavernous warehouse and instructs his actors live out constructed lives. He hires an actor to play himself, and others to play the people he knows. The staging of the play takes on a life of its own as the sets just keep getting bigger and bigger and more elaborate, until the fabricated New York begins to look every bit as real as a real city. And when the actors begin to intermingle with Cotard's real life the line between the play and real life becomes even more blurred.
This is a fascinating movie that will frustrate some and stimulate others. Just sit back and enjoy this labyrinth from the mind of Charlie Kaufman ("Adaptation", "Being John Malkovich").
