Philip Seymour Hoffman doesn’t quite understand what’s happening to him in SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, March 25, free with museum admission, 6:00
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.sonyclassics.com/synecdocheny
In films such as Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999), Adaptation. (Spike Jonze, 2002), Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (George Clooney, 2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004), writer Charlie Kaufman has created bizarre, compelling alternate views of reality that adventurous moviegoers have embraced, even if they didn’t understand everything they saw. Well, Kaufman has done it again, challenging audiences with his directorial debut, the very strange but mesmerizing Synecdoche, New York. Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as the bedraggled Caden Cotard, a local theater director in Schenectady mounting an inventive production of Death of a Salesman. Just as the show is opening, his wife, avant-garde artist Adele Lack (Catherine Keener), decides to take an extended break in Europe with their four-year-old daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein), and Adele’s kooky assistant, Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh). As Caden starts coming down with a series of unexplainable health problems (his last name, by the way — Cotard — is linked with a neurological syndrome in which a person believes they are dead or dying or do not even exist), he wanders in and out of offbeat personal and professional relationships with box-office girl Hazel (a nearly unrecognizable Samantha Morton), his play’s lead actress, Claire Keen (Michelle Williams), his therapist, Madeleine Gravis (Hope Davis), and Sammy (Tom Noonan), a man who has been secretly following him for years. After winning a MacArthur Genius Grant, Caden begins his grandest production yet, a massive retelling of his life story, resulting in radical shifts between fantasy and reality that will have you laughing as you continually scratch your head, hoping to stimulate your brain in order to figure out just what the heck is happening on-screen.
Evoking such films as Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 and City of Women, Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries as well as the labyrinthine tales of Argentine writers Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, Synecdoche, New York is the kind of work that is likely to become a cult classic over the years, requiring multiple viewings to help understand it all. The film is screening March 25 at the Museum of the Moving Image and will be introduced by production designer Mark Friedberg, who will be leading a Moving Image Master Class at 3:00 ($20) with chief curator David Schwartz. In addition, Hoffman is currently appearing in Mike Nichols’s new Broadway version of Death of a Salesman, the show he is putting together in Synecdoche, New York.