HAVE you heard the one about the guy who goes into the doctor’s surgery with a frog on his head and the doctor says: “How did it get there?” and the frog says: “It started as a boil on my behind?”
There’s also another one about asking directions in Ireland and the Irish guy says: “I wouldn’t start from here.”
Both stories are relevant – honest! – to Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York.
What starts out as a familiar (sort of) tale of a neurotic, hypochondriac, Woody Allen-type writer/director spins off into murky waters, some charted, some off the charts and off the wall, to take in deep and dark musings and meditations on life, love, pain, storytelling, acting, growing old, dying and the whole thing.
It’s more Bergman or Fellini than Woody (although, in many ways, they’re all the same).
What starts as a mildly annoying boil on the posterior, kind of gnawing away at ... something ... becomes a fully-formed, all-encompassing, impenetrable puzzle that gnaws away at ... everything.
You might not want to start from there, and you might not want to go there – but you’re not Charlie Kaufman, and you’re not the frog. But really, we’re all looking for directions, one way or another.
Synecdoche, New York is both masterpiece and self-indulgent claptrap at the same time. It’s probably one of the most infuriating movies you will ever see, but not to be missed. It’s funny and sad. Mad and bad. Revealing and obscure.
It’s too clever-clever for its own good, but never dumb.
Kaufman is the writer of Being John Malkovich (hilarious and intriguing but eventually falling apart amid its own preposterousness), Adaptation. (hugely over-rated) and others.
Directing here for the first time, he lets it all hang out – he almost redefines the sheer scale and scope of the very word “ambitious” as he looks inward and spouts it all outward, all the existential angst and the bellybutton-fluff musings. Somehow, it holds together. Somehow, it achieves and sustains a real weight and a real authority. Somehow, it’s genius.
Among a splendid ensemble cast, Philip Seymour Hoffman, as stage writer-director Caden Cotard, the Kaufman role, if you like, is very good, if cosy and over-familiar – everything he does here, we’ve seen him do before.
But the picture is stolen from under everyone else’s noses by a fantastic Samantha Morton and, too briefly, the great Tom Noonan (Manhunter, Heat, The Pledge).
Emily Watson and Dianne Wiest are also revelations – in different ways – in the late going. You will enjoy their turns if by that time you haven’t pulled out your hair and/or eyeballs. Another warning, if needed, that Kaufman’s philosophical doodlings and dribblings MIGHT drive you to despair long before the two hour-plus running time has completed its course.
The film’s, and Kaufman’s, biggest fault is over-ambition. In reaching for the profound, he flirts with the banal – lines like: “Everyone is the lead in their own story.”
If you’re worrying about the title, there is nowhere called Synecdoche (it’s a word that means “a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part”). There is, however, somewhere called Schenectady.
If you want to get to Synecdoche, New York, hopefully your journey will have started here. Ribbit.