Art as Life as Art as an English Lesson

“Synecdoche” is a word almost no one knows going into Synecdoche, New York—Charlie Kaufman’s star-studded new film and directorial debut—but everyone understands on the way out. For the protagonist, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), his life’s work becomes a synecdoche for the life itself , with the pall of death hanging indiscriminately over sign, signifier, and signified.

The press notes conveniently provide a definition for the prescient title, also a play on the name of Caden’s hometown—Schenectady, naturally. For those of you who are not English majors, a synecdoche is a figure of speech in which:
A part is used for the whole
Or
A whole stands for a part.

Kaufman, luminous author of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, and Being John Malkovich, set out to write a horror film for Spike Jonze to direct, but turned out this script instead. There are traces of the film it might have been—the subtle hints, for example, that we see from time to time of the man who follows Caden around his whole life. It is far from a horror film, though: it is a project as ambitious as the one it portrays, and in that is a synecdoche in itself.

Caden Cotard is a theater director living a dissatisfied life, in an unhappy marriage with his artist wife Adele (played by the talented Catherine Keener). Everything changes when Adele leaves for an exhibition in Berlin, taking their daughter Olive with her, and Caden wins a MacArthur genius grant. As time passes and Adele doesn’t return, Caden decides to use his money to stage a play in an enormous warehouse in New York. He constructs replicas of the streets, the buildings, and the apartments which his loved ones inhabit, and hires actors to play themselves and to play the characters in his life. The play begins to become his life, even as his life is imitated in the play. If, we ponder, death is the inevitable ending to life, then must it be the end of the play also?

Cotard’s creation never really comes to fruition over the years he pours into it for its simple lack of an ending—but the end is never really in question. The film drags a bit towards the end. It feels hours longer than its actual 130 minutes, but this meshes well with other issues of temporality explored in the film: the opening shot displays a clock, and another is seen just before the end. Only a minute has elapsed, forcing us to confront our own meaninglessness in the big picture.

The women in the cast almost universally give standout performances, especially the talented Samantha Morton as Caden’s assistant, Hazel. Synecdoche, New York is an intellectual and, at times, difficult offering to a broad, somewhat mainstream audience. It’s quite a feat, and something that is definitely worth seeing once, and probably two or three times more.