So very meta--

One last surprise for the old year. Charlie Kaufman is a writer of TV shows and movies. I didn’t like Being John Malkovich, I didn’t like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and I hated Adaptation. The ideas behind all those movies are interesting but the films themselves are obnoxious and off-putting and full of decent actors doing bad work (and the dreadful Jim Carrey being dreadful). There were two reasons why I even made a stab at watching Synecdoche, New York; 1) Kaufman hadn’t directed any of the above films—this is his directing debut, so I figured he couldn't do any worse than Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry; 2) ever since my graduate school days, I've had a love/hate thing for works of postmodernism and metafiction. So I gave this a shot and to my almost horrified surprise, I liked it.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is a schlubby struggling theater director (has Hoffman ever played a non-schlubby character?) who, after having a moderate success with a version of Death of a Salesman, decides to go whole hog on a huge theater project: staging his own ongoing life story, in a huge warehouse set the size of several city blocks, with actors playing the parts of himself, his loved ones, and friends. The unfinished project goes on for years, and eventually Hoffman casts actors to play the actors who are playing real people. His wife leaves him, his daughter grows up, his romantic life suffers, and he becomes paranoid about his health. Still, the show must go on.

The key for me to enjoying this movie was letting go of any ideas of reality or coherence right from the get go. The first scene depicts what seems to be an average day in Hoffman's life while working on "Salesman," but if you pay attention to background details, you see that months are flying by (from September to Halloween to Christmas and beyond) rather than minutes. Not only is time weird here but so are everyday events: his young daughter poops neon-green; years later, after his artist wife and daughter leave for Europe, the daughter's diary, hidden under her pillow, updates itself magically with entries on her experiences; the wife has a successful career creating paintings so small that they can only be seen through a magnifying glass; a young woman whom Hoffman begins dating lives in a house that is perpetually on fire. Rather than being a chore to keep track of, the later doubling and tripling of characters/actors becomes great fun.

Perhaps most surprisingly, amongst all these postmodern & metafictional shenanigans, I actually found a rather sad and almost profound core of feeling at the center of the film, though I can't really articulate what "message," if any, I took away from it all. I think it's probably allied to Samuel Beckett's "I can't go on; I'll go on" philosophy expressed in several of his works. You can feel the weight of Hoffman's problems, real, imagined, or exaggerated, pressing down on him and yet he continues to work (for 17 years!) on his "play." Hoffman is fantastic (not unusual), and the rest of the cast, including Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Dianne Weist, and Tom Noonan, are fine, though no one else is given enough "meat" as a character to challenge Hoffman. I suppose to truly unravel the plot mysteries, you would need to watch this several times, but I'm not sure I want to go back and break the spell of the first viewing.