Synecdoche, New York


Synecdoche, New York is a 2008 American postmodern comedy-drama film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman in his directorial debut. It stars Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The plot follows an ailing theater director as he works on an increasingly elaborate stage production whose extreme commitment to realism begins to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality. The film's title is a play on Schenectady, New York, where much of the film is set, and the concept of synecdoche, wherein a part of something represents the whole, or vice versa.
The film premiered in competition at the 61st Annual Cannes Film Festival on May 23, 2008. Sony Pictures Classics acquired the United States distribution rights, paying no money but agreeing to give the film's backers a portion of the revenues. It had a limited theatrical release in the U.S. on October 24, 2008, and was a commercial failure on its initial release.
The story and themes of Synecdoche, New York polarized critics: some called it pretentious or self-indulgent; others declared it a masterpiece and later listed it among the best films of the 2000s, with Roger Ebert ranking it #1. It was also nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.

Plot

Theater director Caden Cotard finds his life unraveling. He suffers from numerous physical ailments and has been growing increasingly alienated from his wife, Adele, an artist. He hits rock bottom when Adele leaves him for a new life in Berlin, taking their four-year-old daughter Olive with her.
After the success of his production of Death of a Salesman, Caden unexpectedly receives a MacArthur Fellowship, which gives him the financial means to pursue his artistic interests. He is determined to use it to create an artistic piece of brutal realism and honesty, something into which he can pour his whole self. Gathering an ensemble cast into an enormous warehouse in Manhattan's Theater District, he directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing them to live out their constructed lives. As the mockup inside the warehouse grows increasingly mimetic of the city outside, Caden continues to look for solutions to his personal crises. He is traumatized as he discovers Adele has become a celebrated painter in Berlin and Olive is growing up under the questionable guidance of Adele's friend Maria. After a failed attempt at a fling with Hazel, he marries Claire, an actress in his cast, and has a daughter with her. Their relationship ultimately fails, and he continues his awkward relationship with Hazel, who is by now married with children and working as his assistant. Meanwhile, an unknown condition is systematically shutting down his autonomic nervous system.
As the years rapidly pass, the continually expanding warehouse is isolated from the deterioration of the city outside. Caden buries himself ever deeper into his magnum opus, blurring the line between reality and the world of the play by populating the cast and crew with doppelgängers. For instance, Sammy Barnathan is cast in the role of Caden in the play after Sammy reveals that he has been obsessively following Caden for 20 years, while Sammy's lookalike is cast as Sammy. Sammy's interest in Hazel sparks a revival of Caden's relationship with her, leading Sammy to commit suicide.
As he pushes against the limits of his personal and professional relationships, Caden lets an actress take over his role as director and takes on her previous role as Ellen, Adele's custodian. He lives out his days in the model of Adele's apartment under the replacement director's instruction while some unexplained calamity occurs in the warehouse leaving ruins and bodies in its wake. Finally, he prepares for death as he rests his head on the shoulder of an actress who had previously played Ellen's mother, seemingly the only person in the warehouse still alive. As the scene fades to gray, Caden says that now he has an idea of how to do the play when the director's voice in his ear gives him his final cue: "Die."

Cast

The film began when Sony Pictures Classics approached Kaufman and Spike Jonze about making a horror film. The two began working on a film dealing with things they found frightening in real life, rather than typical horror-film tropes. This project eventually evolved into Synecdoche. Jonze was originally slated to direct, but chose to direct Where the Wild Things Are instead.

Motifs

;The burning house
;The end is built into the beginning
;Miniature paintings and the impossible warehouses
;Jungian psychology
;References to delusion
;Play within a play
;Death and decay
;Simulacrum
;Hazel's books

Critical reception

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 68% based on 187 reviews, with an average rating of 6.77/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Charlie Kaufman's ambitious directorial debut occasionally strains to connect, but ultimately provides fascinating insight into a writer's mind." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 67 out of 100, based on 34 critics, indicating "generally positive reviews". A number of critics have compared it to Federico Fellini's 1963 film 8½.
In his review in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert said, "I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film the subject of 'Synecdoche, New York' is nothing less than human life and how it works. Using a neurotic theater director from upstate New York, it encompasses every life and how it copes and fails. Think about it a little and, my god, it's about you. Whoever you are." In 2009 Ebert wrote that the movie was the best of the decade. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times said, "To say that 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... Despite its slippery way with time and space and narrative and Mr. Kaufman’s controlled grasp of the medium, Synecdoche, New York is as much a cry from the heart as it is an assertion of creative consciousness. It’s extravagantly conceptual but also tethered to the here and now." In the Los Angeles Times, Carina Chocano called the film "wildly ambitious... sprawling, awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, frustrating, hard-to-follow and achingly, achingly sad."
Negative reviews mostly called the film incomprehensible, pretentious, depressing, or self-indulgent. Rex Reed, Richard Brody and Roger Friedman, all labeled it one of the worst films of 2008. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a D+ and wrote, "I gave up making heads or tails of Synecdoche, New York, but I did get one message: The compulsion to stand outside of one's life and observe it to this degree isn't the mechanism of art — it's the structure of psychosis." American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, "...it seems more like an illustration of his script than a full-fledged movie, proving how much he needs a Spike Jonze or a Michel Gondry to realize his surrealistic conceits."
The Moving Arts Film Journal ranked the film at #80 on its list of "The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time". In addition, it is the 61st-most acclaimed film of the 21st century according to review aggregator They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?

Top ten lists

The film appeared on many critics' top-ten lists of the best films of 2008. Both Kimberly Jones and Marjorie Baumgarten of the Austin Chronicle named it the best film of the year, as did Ray Bennett of The Hollywood Reporter.
It appeared on 101 "Best of 2008" lists with 20 of them giving it the number one spot. Some of those who placed it in their top ten included Manohla Dargis of The New York Times, Richard Corliss of Time, Shawn Anthony Levy of The Oregonian, Josh Rosenblatt of the Austin Chronicle, Joe Neumaier of the New York Daily News, Ty Burr and Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe, Lou Lumenick of the New York Post, Philip Martin of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Scott Foundas of LA Weekly, and Walter Chaw, Bill Chambers and Ian Pugh of Film Freak Central.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times named it the best film of the 2000s. In the 2012 Sight & Sound poll, four critics ranked it among the 10 greatest films of all time, and Ebert considered the film a strong contender for his own list.
In a 2016 BBC critics' poll, Synecdoche, New York was ranked the 20th-greatest film of the 21st century.
In 2019, the film ranked as #7 in The 100 Best Films of the 21st Century poll conducted by The Guardian.

Awards and nominations

was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the 2008 Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Kaufman was awarded Best Original Screenplay by the Austin Film Critics Association and the film was placed on their Top 10 Films of the Year list.
The film won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature and the Robert Altman Award at the 2008 Independent Spirit Awards ceremony; it also was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay.
At the 2008 Gotham Independent Film Awards, the film tied with Vicky Cristina Barcelona for Best Ensemble Cast.
Mark Friedberg won the 2008 Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Production Design.
The film was nominated by the Visual Effects Society Awards in the categories of "Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Feature Motion Picture," "Outstanding Matte Paintings in a Feature Motion Picture," and "Outstanding Created Environment in a Feature Motion Picture."