'It is what it is'

Charlie Kaufman is perhaps the closest thing in contemporary Hollywood to an “auteur screenwriter.” And, while his work may have connections to the likes of Pinter and Beckett, he remains singular nonetheless. His feature debut —1999’s “Being John Malkovich,” directed by Spike Jonze — remains one of the most brilliant and unclassifiable films of the last few decades.
Since then, he has written “Adaptation” (2002), Jonze’s second film; “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” (2002) for George Clooney; and two films for director Michel Gondry, “Human Nature” (2001) and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004). He’s received Oscar nominations for three of those five — “Malkovich,” “Adaptation” (shared with elusive brother Donald), and “Eternal Sunshine” — winning for the last.

With “Synecdoche, New York,” he makes an assured transition to directing ... particularly assured when you remember that he’s working from a screenplay by such a daunting writer — himself. It would be impossible to suggest that he fails: If ever there were a movie to make a critic throw up his hands and mutter, “It is what it is,” this is it (what it is). There are some notable differences between his approach and those of his previous directors, differences which also make for a tougher film to experience.

The protagonist is Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a small-time theater director, based (I think) in the upstate city punningly referred to in the title. (I wonder if he ever considered calling it “Metonymy Falls, Wisconsin” — sorry, English major joke.) I’m unsure, because, as the film progresses, the boundaries between Schenectady and New York City grow a little fuzzy, though not as fuzzy as the boundaries between reality and artifice, the present and the past, and the identities of most of the characters.

Caden sounds like a hypochondriac, but he does seem to have legitimate health concerns, with a series of rare illnesses and strange accidents. Worse yet, his home life is falling apart: His first wife, Adele (Catherine Keener), has decamped to Europe with their daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein), and Adele’s creepy best friend, Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh).

When Caden receives a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, he decides to mount an unprecedentedly honest experimental theater piece. He rents a massive warehouse in New York City, where, after some indecision, he begins to stage an ongoing portrayal of his current life. He casts Sammy Barnathan (Tom Noonan), who has been surreptitiously following him around for 20 years, to play himself (that is, Caden) — which means he must hire another actor to play Sammy. When Caden’s second wife, Claire (Michelle Williams), leaves him, he moves into the warehouse set of their apartment, further blurring our sense of what’s real.

As the play increasingly becomes about Caden’s staging of the play, he has to start hiring actors to play the actors playing the actors ... and on, theoretically, to infinity. (Amusingly, the actress hired to portray his assistant/occasional lover, played by Samantha Morton, is played by Emily Watson. It’s a relief: I guess I’m not the only one who has occasionally gotten them confused. If only Emily Mortimer had shown up somewhere as well ...)

As he begins to deteriorate with age, he slowly switches identities with the actress (Dianne Wiest) who has replaced Sammy in the role of Caden ... or has he switched identities with the cleaning-lady character she had previously portrayed rather than with the actress herself?

Okay, your head should be starting to hurt right around now. And, despite all the detail I’ve just given, you still don’t know the half of it. Kaufman has created something with innumerable levels and innumerable possible readings. Of his earlier work, it bears the most obvious resemblance to “Adaptation,” where, by the end, we never knew whether we were in the book “The Orchid Thief” or the film of the book or a different film written by Kaufman’s brother, or somewhere else. Possibly they’ve all converged into one more complex narrative.

You can look at “Synecdoche, New York” as a theological metaphor: Caden is the god of the warehouse, creating a complete but imperfect world and eventually fading away, perhaps at the direction of a greater god or perhaps at the hand of the characters he’s created as they take on a life of their own.

You can look at it as a description of memory: Time elapses inconsistently. Locked into Caden’s self-absorbed POV, the audience at times is led to believe that a few weeks or months have passed when it’s actually been years. When he wonders when his wife is going to return home from her “vacation,” his assistant/occasional lover says, “It's been a year!” “It’s been a week,” he insists, which is closer to what we’ve been led to think. (Or maybe it was his second wife in that scene. Details like that began to get mixed up in my mind before the closing credits had ended.) There are flashbacks that may not be flashbacks, but rather parts of his life in reenactment.

You can also look at it as another “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” story — with the whole thing taking place in Caden’s mind, part memory, part might-have-been future, at the moment he dies. Caden and his surrogates have several near-fatal moments; a character asks, “Why did you kill yourself?”, then claims to have said “Why would you kill yourself?” Even more interesting, if farfetched: One of Caden’s first lines of dialogue is “Harold Pinter died”; then, realizing he’s misread the newspaper, he corrects himself: “No, he didn’t die. He won the Nobel Prize.” A half-hour later (in our time), Caden receives his MacArthur Grant shortly after suffering a terrifying seizure. Did he die from the seizure? Is he actually in some confused afterlife, replaying and jumbling up his memories and dreams?

Maybe it’s all taking place in Harold Pinter’s mind.

“Synecdoche, New York” began its life as a horror movie and, if the tone is different, there still remain traces of that idea. In fact, it has a striking number of elements in common (clearly coincidentally) with Danny and Oxide Pang’s Hong Kong horror film “Re-Cycle,” released here just a few months ago. To equate them, however, would be like equating “2001: A Space Odyssey” with, say, “Rocketship X-M.”

Kaufman’s scripts can be hilariously funny and horribly depressing at the same time; and there are some hysterical moments herein. But Jonze and (to a lesser extent) Gondry played up the humor, seducing us into grimness through a candy coating. Kaufman — thanks to either conscious decision-making, temperamental inclination, or a less deft touch — has made “Synecdoche, New York” far less funny.

As a result, it may not be everyone’s cup of tea. The film is really quite brilliant, but it’s also so difficult and so emotionally downbeat that it’s hard to characterize it as “entertaining.”