Loading ...Screen Daily - Charlie Kaufman is a past master of ingenious conceits and wild flights of fantasy as witnessed particularly in Being John Malkovich and Enternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. His talent has always been filtered through the vision of a sympathetic director but with Synecdoche, New York he assumes the director’s role for the first time. The result is a film of staggering imagination, more daring in content than form as it explores the unbearable fragility of human existence and the sad inevitability of death.
Flashes of comic genius and melancholy insight into the human condition are woven into an increasingly elaborate canvas in which the boundaries between artifice and reality are slowly erased. Mainstream audiences are likely to find it simply too weird and unfathomable for their viewing pleasure but surely nobody expected Kaufman to make What Happens In Vegas? Fans of his previous work, admirers of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman and open-minded curiosity seekers should be enough to give the film a fighting chance of box- office returns on a level with previous Kaufman screenplays.
Synecdoche begins with material that lulls the viewers into the false expectation of a much more conventional film. Theatre director Caden (Hoffman) is staging a production of Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman and all around him there are a signs and portents reminding him that life is short, death is always around the corner and time is running out to leave his mark on the world. His young daughter is concerned by the colour of her poo and his wife, artist Adele (Keener) confesses that she has fantasized about Caden dying and having the freedom to start over. This is the stuff of a Woody Allen comedy or a Philip Roth novel and written with the kind of bitter wit and eye for the offbeat that makes it both extremely funny and engaging… [Full Story]
