Susan Granger’s review of “Synecdoche, New York” (Sony Pictures Classics)
First of all, no one knows how to pronounce it %u2013 and when you see this existential fantasia, you’re not sure what it’s about. But it’s created by Charlie Kaufman, who wrote “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Despite working with a therapist (Hope Davis), upstate New York theater director, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) finds his marriage to painter Adele Lack (Catherine Keener) is on the rocks. They have a five year-old daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein), who expels radioactive-green feces and goes off to Berlin with her mother and her monstrous nanny (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Desolate Caden is a hypochondriac, his body riddled with mysterious symptoms. There’s no continuous timeline, so over the next decades, as Caden’s dismal world disintegrates into a surreal, synaptic blur, he stages a massive warehouse project that includes the pivotal women in his life, played by Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton and Dianne Wiest, using Tom Noonan as his alter ego with Emily Watson. Sound confusing? It is. Ever since New York Times critic Manohla Dargis gushed, “To say (this) is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now” %u2013 “Synecdoche” has become an “Emperor’s New Clothes.” Obviously, Dargis was not put off by its ambiguous incomprehensibility, channeling David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive.” The title is mispronunciation of Schenectady, where Cotard lives, and according to its Greek derivation ‘synedoche’ means “a receiving together.” On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Synecdoche, New York” is a weird, tiresome 3. Fellini did this rumination on love, hate and the creative process far better in “8 ½.” (1963).
