Synecdoche, New York

"Everybody's disappointed the more you know someone."

Today's matinee adventure was Charlie Kaufman's latest mind-fuck. The writer who brought you Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind now toys with your synapses with Synecdoche, New York (sin-ECK-duh-key). Two hours and I am spent. My brain hurts.


But first, the trailer:


Wow. Where to begin?

Abstraction, alternate realities overlapping with the current one, wrinkles in the fabric of the time continuum, it's all a little overwhelming. Honestly, I need to see this again to fully absorb it and give an ATTEMPT to understand it fully. And maybe go to the theater absolutely HAMMERED on some chemical indulgence. That may help.

Time is compressed for Philip Seymour Hoffman's sickly character. (Have I ever mentioned PSH is a man-crush?) A week is a year. His seemingly 4-year-old daughter is now 10, then 20. I mean, 3 months elapse just during the opening breakfast scene. Three months!

A playwright who focuses on revivals of already-established plays, he struggles to "make his OWN mark" in the world of theater. Create something truly HIS. After his artistic painter wife leaves him for Germany to make her own mark alone, he manages to win an endowment grant. What to do with the influx of artistic cash? Make the great epic play. And make it before the fates draw him to his grave.

The play grows and confounds you. Actors are characters, the character's actors are involved in the play. Actors who play actors who play actors all "rehearse" life in real-time on a mammoth soundstage replicating real life. Follow me?

Yikes. Basically, PSH's character, in focusing on his OWN story, has an epiphany and comes to realize that EVERYBODY is a leading role in the play of their own lives, and no one is a minor character.

With my own recent tribulations in the field of relationships and love, some elements of the film truly spoke to me. You cannot force someone to love you, force someone to stay. From their perspective, THEY are their own leading role and will leave you at their whim. Their story continues on. Without you if it may.

A soliloquy by a minister on the soundstage mourning the death of a character portraying PSH's role struck a chord. Searching Sony Pictures Classics for the script allows me to share it with you here:

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you'll never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce.

And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved.

And the truth is I'm so angry and the truth is I'm so fucking sad, and the truth is I've been so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long have been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own, and their own is too overwhelming to allow them to listen to or care about mine.

Well, fuck everybody.

Amen.

Powerfully mesmerizing film. And really an abstraction that I struggle to comprehend. I need to see this again. But even so, the score is a smidge below Full Price, Matinee Plus for me. Maybe when I see it again (and try to follow along a little better) the score may rise.

Pass the aspirin.