What to say about the new Charlie Kaufman film Synecdoche, NY? The friend I went to go see it with said it was “a downer” and a movie she didn’t think she’d ever feel the need to see again. I was able to sympathize with that appraisal, especially being that we saw it on a Friday night and it left us both just wanting to go home and skip out on our other plans. But to me, it just seemed very Buddhist- a weird, wacky meditation on impermanence.

For anyone who might not know what it’s about, the film’s protagonist Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a middle aged theater director living in Schenectady NY with his wife Adele (Catherine Keener) and their 4 year old daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein). Caden is plagued by strange ailments and worries that he’s dying (quicker than normal) at which point Adele, a painter, informs him that she’s taking Olive to Berlin with her for an opening and thinks it’s best if he stays behind. This comes after a painful therapy session in which Adele confesses that she sometimes dreams of Caden dying and having the chance to start over and feels happy. After being left alone, a despondent Caden receives notification that he’s won a MacArthur grant and tells his therapist (hilariously played by Hope Davis) that he wants to create a theater piece that’s “big and true”. Caden sets about building a microcosm of NY in a giant warehouse space and soon the cast grows to literally thousands. He casts someone to play himself and the line between fiction and reality becomes increasingly blurred. In his endless and obsessive tinkering, Caden becomes a spectator to his own life. Eventually the cast members stare him down and one asks, “When are we going to get an audience in here? It’s been 17 years.”
There’s much more that could be said of the actual plot and performances, but on the larger scale Caden’s existential crisis of realizing that he doesn’t have endless time and that he wants to do something important while he’s still here is very much the truth of impermanence. This truth looms large in the film as we see those closest to Caden die. Another stark reminder is that Caden’s true love Hazel lives in a house that’s literally on fire. Everything is in the process of death and decay. The film is also about failed expectations. At the beginning of the film, Caden asks Adele if he’s disappointed her, to which she responds, “Everyone’s disappointing, the more you get to know them.” Again- impermanence. It’s our clinging to fixed ideas of people that cause pain. Of course people are going to be disappointing, but it’s about realizing that that disappointment is more about us than them and allowing people the freedom and agency to live their lives free from our direction. Caden seems to get to this point by the film’s end when he finally concludes that no one is an extra, rather “they’re all leads in their own stories.”
I did have criticisms of the film, which were largely the same as others I’ve read- it’s a little long, misogynist (Kaufman seems to have a problem with women, unless they’re the older, maternal type) and it’s very white. These (important) issues aside, I’m a fan of the strange worlds Kaufman creates. I like the quirky jokes and the random acts that seem to defy logic. He’s certainly an original voice.
I feel like I’m leaving about 80 important things out and there was certainly a lot to analyze, but I don’t want to write a thesis. What did everyone else think?