Sarcastigate at the Movies: Synecdoche, New York
Charlie Kaufman is, without a doubt, one of the most creative and ambitious writers working in the world today. Though this movie is ultimately a miserable failure, his ambition and gift still allow me to understand how it was elevated to numerous top-10 lists for 2008.
First, and most notably, the ambition of it all. This movie did not reveal itself to me as much as a movie as it did an experience akin to waterboarding — not in the tortuous sense but in the sensory. I was completely sucked in, seduced by the developments of the characters and the incredible furtherance of metaphor. The beauty in the character development may have only been eclipsed by the profound sadness and the pronounced misery that was in the screenplay.
The same unraveling that exists in the fictional Cadens’ work is exactly the cause for the movie to result in incredible failure. Cadens theatrical work sprawls and expands and overflows and just grows to be too damn big to ever be possible. Spectacular stories and relationships exist as disconnected (but never really so) from each other and from the “outside world.” In the same way, Kaufman begins with an idea for a movie, then 2 movies, then 100 movies, and then every movie ever created that will ever be created. In typical Kaufman fashion, the viewer is never quite sure where the film and the meta-film and reality truly overlap (and in my case, the continuation of the film into my Kaufman-edited dreams.) The problem, however, is that this movie is finished. It’s a complete representative of a work that will never and can, by definition, never be complete. It’s not the happy medium between Cadens’ unfortunately enormous work and Adeles’ unfortunately small. It’s failure. It’s surrender. It’s reality — or, at least, some trippy representation of the limitations of cinema. (Or, at the very, very least — a trippy representation as Kaufmans failure as a director.) And yes, I understand, that’s exactly what the literary allusion in the title refers to. A piece representing a larger whole. My head continues to hurt.
I’d love to be able to rewind the entire experience and allow Spike Jonze to more deftly steer this. As a directorial debut it was just too much, too much, too much.
