Addendum: Synecdoche, NY

I don't need to go into detail with respect to the plot of this film, because Aaron did a thorough treatment of all of that here. I just want to make a couple comments:

1. The film is an exotic piece of modern art and deserves to be studied as such. It is essentially the culmination of years of Charlie Kaufman meditations on involution and recurrence (see Being John Malkovich, Adaptation). It bangs you over the head with this concept. For example, he puts on a theater production which is essentially recreations of real lives, including his own, including the theater production, and inside that theater production is another, and so on. The big themes are death and identity. Not light stuff.

2. As a piece of modern art, it has worth. Visually, it is at times compelling, giving us surrealistic images which are quite interesting (e.g., a character moves into a house that is actually on fire; a character paints on microscopic canvasses). Regarding the narrative, a variety of tricks are used: time elapses quickly in some places, the protagonist reads a book that speaks to him and refers to his actual environment. The movie is a hodgepodge of these weird pieces and metafictive techniques, each individually intriguing, but not joining together to make a cohesive or meaningful whole.

3. As a movie, however it suffers from two major flaws. First, it is irredeemably depressing. The protagonist is hopeless in so many ways: his health is failing him, he cannot develop happy relationships, and he regrets everything. No less than four of his family members die during the course of the film. He spends the whole movie thinking about, talking about, and watching his own death occur. Second, it is incredibly hard to watch. Perhaps as a result of its lack of a real plot, or because of the strange lapses in (and confusion about time), it lacks momentum. I watched the first half-hour and was optimistic -- I thought, "OK, this could be good." By the 1:30 point, I was very close to turning it off. All the themes were established by then, and it wasn't "going anywhere." It didn't go anywhere -- and maybe that's the point Charlie wants to make (see Adaptation for how Charlie uses the effectiveness of the movie itself as a way to get across his "point"). Regardless, getting that point wasn't worth the suffering of watching the film.

Recommendation: Only for students of the philosophy of death and identity, or hardcore Philip Seymour Hoffman fans.