Philip Seymour Hoffman has a lot to clean up in SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)
The Philoctetes Center
247 East 82nd St.
Friday, March 25, free (suggested donation $20), 7:00
646-422-0544
www.philoctetes.org
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 Philoctetes Center as part of the hundredth anniversary celebration of the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute and will be followed by a discussion with psychoanalyst Arthur Heiserman, Columbia professor Maura Spiegel, and Philoctetes film coordinator Matthew von Unwerth.
Ivan’s Childhood (aka My Name Is Ivan) is a magnificent work about a fearless young boy (Nikolai Burlyayev) who spies for the Russians during World War II. But for all of his outward toughness—battling fearlessly with the other soldiers to prove his military value, dirt seemingly entrenched on his face—he is still a young boy who dreams of another, safer life, wrapped in his mother’s arms. Based on a short story by Vladimir Bogomolov, this award-winning masterpiece, which marked Andrei Tarkovsky’s feature-film debut, is filled with unforgettable images that will stay with you long after the film is over. Ivan’s Childhood is screening March 25 at the Rubin Museum in conjunction with the Brainwave series of talks and will be introduced by NYU assistant professor Michael Kunichika. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes follows on April 8, introduced by Benjamin Millepied, and Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie on April 15, introduced by Kurt Andersen.
Miloš Forman’s final Czechoslovakian film is an absurdist comedy about a local firemen’s ball and lottery, featuring a group of grumpy old clueless men who struggle through selecting contestants for the beauty contest so the winner can give the eighty-six-year-old former chairman a present before he dies of cancer and all the lottery gifts are stolen. This fun film has a charming element of silent slapstick that will have audiences laughing out loud. Loves of a Blonde and The Firemen’s Ball are screening March 25 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Janus Classics series, followed by Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach (1952) and The Rules of the Game (1939) on March 28, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and Cries and Whispers (1972) on March 29, and more. 
