Imitation of Life: Synecdoche, New York

His body is doing strange things, any of which may cradle some indefinable kernel of death waiting to metastasize. He is attacked by his own sink. His wife is becoming distant, dissatisfied and resentful. He aspires toward some startling innovation for the stage, yet he’s directing Death of a Salesman at an amateur theatre for small town blue-hairs, the incongruently young actors and deluge of lighting cues being his meager concessions to formalist provocation. His lead actress and the sultry box office attendant both make advances, yet he’s too paralyzed and conflicted to respond. His daughter’s poo is green. As mystery ailments mount and relationships collapse, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) develops an acute case of Sisyphus syndrome. Everything seems to bear down on him. So when out of the blue he becomes the unlikely recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, he does the only logical thing: he makes a play about everything. Or everything as can be conveyed through the very peculiar, very funny and very sad experiences of Caden Cotard. He lives in Schenectady, New York, but he’s about to move somewhere you won’t find on a map.

Synecdoche, New York is not as ambitious as Caden’s play. We can say this for the simple reason that the movie was finished—or, if you’d rather, abandoned—whereas the play stays in rehearsal for decades. But screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut is nonetheless mightily impressive, and, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, it’s genuinely like nothing you’ve seen. It teems with metaphor, is sprawling in scope, dense with so many kinds of heartache and is playfully, boundlessly alive with the absurd. It should be far too much for any one movie to hold, but here it is nonetheless, running two hours, and fronted, all too appropriately, by one of the most imminently melancholic and corpulent actors working in interesting movies. Hoffman does Kaufman, thankfully. I’m not sure anyone else could.

After Philip K. Dick, who never made a movie but probably spawned more of them than any late-20th century American writer, Charlie Kaufman must surely be the most influential author of neurological disorder-driven storytelling in current pop culture. What other body of work, from Being John Malkovich to Adaptation to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, has so directly, imaginatively and often perversely addressed the puzzle nature of identity? Selfhood is ever fluid, restless and delightfully insubordinate in Kaufman’s stories, diasporic in its tendencies, spreading out amidst the individual bearer’s surroundings until what you consider uniquely “you” is either infiltrated by another—or many others, if you happen to be John Malkovich—or appropriated by another, ie: the two Kaufmans of Adaptation. Bizarre as it may be, Synecdoche, New York is, in hindsight at least, the inevitable product of the Kaufman project thus far.

While the impossibility of lasting connection between people looms over the film, everything in it thematically connects to everything else. Caden’s wife (Catherine Keener), in a direct reversal of Caden’s attempt to create something massive, makes highly nuanced paintings the size of postage stamps, while his daughter grows up to be literally art-damaged, the confused victim of her parents’ reckless expression. Those closest to Caden exist in some permanent state of metaphor-manifest, most notably Hazel (Samantha Morton, especially wonderful), who, in one of the film’s most inspired conceits, lives in a house that’s perpetually on fire. Caden’s therapist (Hope Davis) writes books that literally speak directly to him. And all of this demands to be woven into Caden’s play. Countless actors are employed. Eventually new actors are hired to play the original actors, because the original actors become part of the story, even threatening to take it over. Vast sets are constructed to contain it all. The whole thing is finally infinite, Borgesian. It’s an attempt to generate authenticity through artifice, to address life through art until art is all that’s left. And perhaps this is why the ending’s so damned blue. The thrill of art is always in the making; the result finally just a eulogy for a process.

A gentle push: Charlie Bartlett

An actual person resembling the titular teenage hero of Charlie Bartlett probably doesn’t exist and never could. Amiable, politically gifted, and imminently resourceful –by which I mean stinking rich– Charlie (Anton Yelchin) is the reincarnation of Ferris Bueller for a generation of kids even more image-conscious and choked by ideologies of consumerism and control than that of Bueller’s Reagan era preppies. Kicked out of several private schools, Charlie goes to public school and, devising an admirably clever scheme to accumulate hordes of prescription drugs, becomes a pusher of Prozac and Ritalin to classmates of every faction. He also turns the school’s boy’s room into a therapist’s office, offering an ear, a shoulder, and instant meds to all at cut-rate prices. And Charlie likes his work, because above all, Charlie just wants to be liked.

I don’t really mind that Charlie himself is such an artificial character. The situations he engineers are pretty fun, and the improbable scope of his powers of persuasion and appeal to the masses thanks to his pharmaceutical operation implies a sly commentary on the loathsome hypocrisies of American drug culture: the pills Charlie pedals are legal, but just as formidable as the illegal ones commonly sought by teens. He also in his daydream world has one of the most charming teen movie moms in recent memory (the lovely Hope Davis), an endearingly clueless, well-dressed tippler too far removed from everyday life to really know how what a normal parent is supposed to do.

What I find more problematic is how wildly unrealistic everything else is in Charlie Bartlett, namely the risibly innocent high schoolers that so easily band together for whatever cause, who all treat Charlie like a God, who (save Tyler Hilton’s appealing bully-for-hire with a sensitive side) each fall into some lame stereotype, who seem universally oblivious to the fact that Charlie’s advice is mostly based on common sense. Charlie’s peers are mostly just a backdrop to a air-brushed fantasy of teen life that could have packed a little more of a comic edge if injected with a dose of real risk, something absent even in the film’s quickie but blandly maudlin suicide attempt scene. It also goes on way too long and ends with one of those singing in the auditorium finales that make any self-respecting teenager gag. Still, the highlights are still more winsome than the vast majority of comedies out there right now.