Product Description

"It will stay with you for days and you will want to see it again. And again." - EMPIRE MAGAZINE, 5 Stars As the writer of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Charlie Kaufman's first outing as director is a singularly inventive affair. As rewarding as it is dazzlingly perplexing, it is the story of theatre director Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and his drive to produce his masterwork. Living in Schenectady, New York, Cotard's life is looking bleak. When he receives a 'genius grant' for his work he sees a way of addressing the despair he feels, and moves his theatre company to a warehouse in New York City to embark on an ambitious on-going project, based on constructing a representation of his life. The stellar cast includes Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton and Diane Wiest.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1535 in DVD
• Released on: 2009-10-12
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 124 minutes

Synopsis
Obsession and identity are recurring themes in screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's work, and he draws on them again in his directorial debut, SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK. Kaufman's film focuses on the wiles of Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a regional theatre director who has won a MacArthur grant to help produce his next project. Cotard's artist wife, Adele Lack (Catherine Keener), subsequently departs with their daughter to Berlin, and he begins a flirtation with box office clerk Hazel (Samantha Morton). Much of the movie revolves around Cotard's ambitious next project, based around his life, which is being constructed in an enormous industrial space in New York City. As the years pass and the project is mired in endless rehearsals that replicate Cotard's existence, the tortured director obsesses over Adele, Hazel, his daughter, his health, and myriad other topics.


The complex and often highly inventive narrative of SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK is typical of Kaufman's screenplays for features such as BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and ADAPTATION. The film draws heavily on the kind of visual trickery that director Spike Jonze has often used in his adaptations of Kaufman's works, and features a strong performance from Hoffman as Cotard. Occasionally the film is abstract and surreal: Hazel lives in a house that is permanently on fire, while the actors Cotard casts in his play often blur the lines between fantasy and reality. Moviegoers will theorize about the true meaning behind Kaufman's feature: it offers no easy answers. SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK is a film that requires as much work from its viewers as it does from the resolutely excellent cast that brought it to life, and as the film careers from hilarity to sadness in the blink of an eye, there's little doubt that this is another superlative entry in Kaufman's canon.

Review
"It will stay with you for days and you will want to see it again. And again." 5 Stars. --Empire Magazine

Customer Reviews

No Subtitles
To my total surprise this DVD doesn't have subtitles so I was unable to watch the film.

The end of Charlie Kaufman.
This movie is insane. More insane than usual, more insane than you would expect or imagine. It is properly insane. Certainly do not ever think about watching this if you can't hack strange films - this is simply nothing to do with normal. Some people will "love" it because they are pseuds, some people will hate it because, reasonably enough, they have some basic requirements of each film they watch - such as it being comprehensible, categorisable and entertaining - lots of other people will love or hate it for every reason under the sun. To be honest the act of recommemding it is laughable.

What I love about it is that this movie is the raw feed. The original, unexpurgated data stream from a creative lunatic. It would be correct to say that it is indulgent, over-long, flabby, in need of a brutal editor/director/someone to act as a counterbalancing force to reign in Charlie Kaufman's excesses, but that would be to judge this work on conventional terms when the pleasure of it is in its unconventionality, that very excess; just revel in the breathtaking ambition/madness that has somehow, invigoratingly, been allowed to take full form. It is beautifully crazy that this exists and it represents the full-stop at the end of Charlie Kaufman.

It reminds me of Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls about buzz directors in the Seventies being given carte-blanche for a tiny window of time after their initial success and how many of them blew it extravagantly. Since reading that book I've been intrigued about (but still know little about) Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, imagining what a film called The Last Movie might be like. What an apt title for Synecdoche, New York that would have been. Just as the film revolves around Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) receiving a "genius grant" to mount his life's great work, Kaufman's kudos, buzz and oscar have afforded him one opportunity to do whatever he wants, and has taken it. This film is the total, full-on, utterly gone-for-it culmination of the Charlie Kaufman project. He will surely never be able to tackle topics and themes bigger - or more grandly - than he does here. Life, love, death, art; He's not holding anything back for the next one, it's like those insects that die at the climax of sex; it's the end. To plenty of people too it will represent Kaufman getting lost up his own end. His career from this point will likely diminsh - a $3 million US box office from a $21 million budget will undoubtedly mean that his visions are not given this kind of freedom in the future. It's Kaufman's Gate.

I guess I haven't said anything about what happens in the film or anything specific about what it is like. But I'm not sure what you would really want or need to know beyond the fact that you should steer well clear if you don't like weird. "Insanity; did Caden Cotard a state-sized miserydome decree..." I'm sure you know the story outline if you are this far down the Amazon page. It is frequently hilarious, frequently depressing, always disturbing, possessed by nightmarish images; characters; moments; like fever-dreams directly spliced into the reels: a terrifying therapist, bizarre German interludes, the entire end sequence etc etc. How he got such fine actors to play these hallucinatory scenes (and in various states of heavy make-up or undress) is anyone's guess. It is Bunuel's Phantom of Liberty & Discreet Charm of the Borgeousie & Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE gothically rolled into one and smoked by Jorge Luis Borges. The whole film is like watching one of those bits in a movie where the evil shape-shifting demon dies and in its throes it manifests all the various guises from its subconscious. All the world's a stage, the play's The Thing.

It is one of those fertile films that gives you a mountain of ideas and leaves you with a dense mass of questions, big and small. What of the lack of an audience for Caden's play? Is the guy who has been "following" Caden meant to represent Kaufman's imitators? The movie seems ruthlessly to take the piss out of creative people - does he hate actors? He seems to ignore writers - but is it all in fact about writing, a post-modern Tempest? The house that is permanently on fire: suggesting Caden's own life is a play directed by someone else and staged on a set?; Meant to denote an irreverent attitude to cinematic "reality"?; Supposed to be an in-joke about the cinematography in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?; Satire of consumerism? Just being silly?

It is yet another Philip Seymour Hoffman film that makes me want to eat more fruit and this time I think I might.

Also, one of the lessons this film tries to teach is probably to spend less time writing or reading these reviews.

Incredibly imaginative, but pointlessly bleak
"Synecdoche, New York" ranks among the more unusual, imaginative and surreal films I've seen during my life. Unfortunately, it's also one of the bleakest films I've seen (that hasn't involved war or child abuse).

The story centres on theatre director Caden Cotard. Caden starts the film married to his artist wife, and things aren't going too well in their marriage. Also not in a good way is Caden's health, as he starts noticing some unusual health problems that no doctor seems able to diagnose.

Without going into detail (it's difficult to, without giving away a lot of what happens), what follows is an incredibly imaginative but very gloomy study of a man's life. Relationships with women feature prominently: in all different shapes and forms: loving, manipulative, threatening, adoring. Fear of death is also explored heavily. There are some wonderful scenes: honest and insightful, some which are also funny.

Unfortunately, while the film is truly unique, it's pointlessly depressing, verging on the ridiculous. The lead character suffers a series of tragedies, some partly self-inflicted, others beyond his control. When piled high, as they are in this film, they cease to provide any emotional punch, as the barrage of tragic events becomes numbing to the viewer.

I still think writer/director Kaufman is talented, and would highly recommend "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (which he also penned), to anyone who hasn't seen it. But for anyone looking for more where that came from, I'd recommend "Eternal Sunshine..." director Michel Gondry's "The Science of Sleep" instead of this.