synecdoche

Whut?

I have to admit I was contemplating leaving that single, misspelled, played-out-net-meme of a word as the entire review for Synecdoche, because it was pretty much my initial reaction. My problem is that since then it's kind of haunted my brain, occupying spare wetware cycles and leading me to either feel like I understand it or don't really get it in equal measure.

Part of the reason for this flip-flopping is that it's massively ambitious, but also massively confusing. It's also very abstract and has more than a touch of self-indulgence about it. If Kaufman is projecting (like all writers and creators) at least some of himself into the main character then what are we to make of things like the "Genius" grant and the fact several women seem to throw themselves at him?

But on the flip-side, he doesn't give that main character anything resembling an easy ride. Caden Cotard (more on that name in a moment) is a theatre director who, when we join him, is neurotic, physically falling to bits and married to a woman who wants out of the relationship big time.

From there on, things don't really get any easier and there's a melancholic, life is full of disappointment, regret, sadness, pain and longing feel to the whole film. Even when he gets this Genius Grant and is given an apparently limitless bucket of money to create whatever he wants, Caden fails to ever actually turn his proposed play into reality. A play is for performance to an audience and at no point does his play ever acquire an audience.

Instead, in its attempt to capture all of life, it becomes like the serpent eating its tail, acquiring ever more actors and layers such that there even end up being actors to play him on multiple levels - there seemed to be actors playing moments from his life that happened, as well as someone playing him as the director of the play.

Which is both clever and confusing at the same time.

It becomes even more confusing towards the end when the actor playing the director him is a woman. And when they do the graveyard scene of burying his mother, this female director decides to ramp things up into an at-once over-the-top but rather profound exaggeration that somehow works even better than the original. It becomes a weird statement that the female actor playing the director version of him is better at directing his own life by making it surreal in what is an already very surrealist reality.

I was struck actually by all sorts of parallels. There's a famous Shakespeare quote that runs something along the lines of "All the world's a stage and the people merely players" and that seems to be the play that Caden is trying to create. There's even one point where Caden says something to the effect that no-one is an extra - everyone is the lead character of their own lives.

Another parallel was with Tristram Shandy. In the Tristram Shandy books, Tristram is trying to write his autobiography, but every day of his life he manages to cover takes an inordinate amount of time to write. Therefore, he's acquiring more days to write about than he has the capacity to write about. Again - Caden's play expands to encompass life, but life is so big it can never be captured ("The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy").

And I feel like there's loads more - that name, Caden Cotard, for example. Cotard Delusion is apparently a condition where the person believes they are dead or don't exist or they have lost organs and in many ways, that's Caden - he's obsessed with death and how bits of him are either broken or not working.

But I didn't know that before I saw it on the internet looking up Synecdoche for this review. Which sort of encapsulates my dilemma about the film - there's bits during it that could have helped me understand that I was ignorant of, but as I discover them I understand the film a bit more.

So I'm left with the slightly weird situation of having found it a little boring and long winded whilst watching it, but slowly coming to enjoy it more some time after.