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.

Schadenfreude and its limits: the not exactly funny, weirdly fascinating, simultaneously iconoclastic and conservative Hamlet 2

“I feel like I’ve been raped… in the face!” This is but one of many highly characteristic, uncomfortably revealing little one-liners that fire up like hot phlegm from the psychological bowels of hopelessly self-involved and dramatically disturbed high school drama teacher Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan). With a desperately unhappy, venomously unloving wife (Catherine Keener, who so rarely loves anybody), a full class of largely disinterested students aspiring to little more than lives of crime, and his entire department about to be wiped off the school curriculum, Marschz is a man reaching a major crisis point. Sorely in need of some solid therapy, he improvises his own flamboyant act of auto-analysis through writing, directing and eventually even starring in a sequel to Shakespeare’s brooding masterpiece that involves time travel, Jesus, greasers, musical numbers and some serious-as-cancer father issues.

Directed by Andrew Fleming (Dick, The In-Laws) and written by Fleming and South Park writer/producer Pam Brady, Hamlet 2 is a racy, ribald, risqué comedy out to bust any number of sentimental stereotypes and empty gestures of political correctness. The residual damage of childhood sexual abuse is here rendered as grounds for hilarity! Racial phobias in the classroom aren’t so much put to rest as capitalized as a launch pad for shamelessly exoticized teenage lust! Yet, curiously, Hamlet 2 is also one of the most deeply conventional movies you’ll see this summer. No less than mainstream feel-good movies like Pride, The Great Debaters or Mr. Holland’s Opus, one of several movies it makes fun of, Hamlet 2 is a textbook go-for-it movie, as well as a let’s-put-on-show movie, religiously observant of every last trope these subgenres imply, from the kids who learn to believe in themselves to the wildly implausible love interest to the even more implausible über-triumphant denouement. It’s entirely possible that Fleming and Brady intentionally adhered to the conventional model as a way of emphasizing the film’s seemingly incompatible let’s-offend-everybody comic sensibility, but that doesn’t make it any less tiresome to watch all the pegs fall all too neatly into place.

It’s hard to know how to approach Hamlet 2, hard to know how to sum up the rollercoaster of responses it invites, the constant swerving from tedium to gut-busting astonishment to strange fascination with just how far the film is willing to plumb Marschz’s not so winning dementia. From the opening montage of his embarrassing non-career in bad TV and infomercials, to highlights of his two-hander stage version of Erin Brokovich, to his endless humiliation at the hands of a spouse who clearly regards his bunk sperm as a sign of his general impotence, to his virtual invisibility as an entity at his place of employment—when the kids playing in the gym where he’s forced to hold his drama classes hit him in the head with a volleyball, it seems less out of spite as utter disregard—Marschz is a parade of fathomless schadenfreude, though only roughly half of the film ever really provokes laughter.

I have to assume Coogan however is laughing all the way to the bank. A distinctive talent with an unusually, palpably sharp comic edge, Coogan is clearly cruising for a big break here, hoping to reach the sort of audience that would never bother with something like 24-Hour Party People, which features Coogan’s outstanding leading performance as Manchester music impresario Tony Wilson, or Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, the two films Coogan’s made with English director Michael Winterbottom. I certainly can’t knock the guy for trying to branch out, but his hamming in Hamlet 2 is taken to such a grotesque extreme that it’s hard to imagine this film making him the bankable star he arguably deserves to be. Dude rollerblades to work in a kaftan.

More bizarre and self-effacing a turn however comes from, get this, Elizabeth Shue, who makes an unexpected appearance as… Elizabeth Shue. She’s apparently given up acting to be a nurse in Tucson, Arizona, where she’s practically mauled by a salivating Marschz eager to brush up against anything vaguely resembling fame. It wouldn’t be so shocking to see Shue turn up in a thankless role if she weren’t playing herself, reciting dumbed-down versions of the sort of smart comments about the heartlessness of the industry she made in her interview with director Mike Figgis for the Hollywood issue of Projections from a few years back. She later has to sit through Marchz’s bombastic—albeit very entertaining—production and make stupid “Wow!” faces the entire time. Like the rest of us, I guess she just doesn’t know what else to say.