Synecdoche New York (2009)

The gaps in my knowledge are vast and fill me with surprises. For example, I thought I'd seen or heard of everything Charlie Kaufman wrote and/or directed, but there was a copy of his directorial debut Synecdoche New York (2009) at the VGH Thrift Store on East Hastings, so of course I bought it. Last night I watched it. 

Synecdoche is the story of a physically deteriorating theatre director in Schenectady, New York who receives a MacArthur Genius Award and, in an effort to escape a life that is escaping him, proceeds to write, build and stage a theatrical production that is ultimately about its own creation, where every actor is a lead in his or her (or their) own life, to the point where actors are brought in to play them, leading to meta moments that transition seamlessly, if not brilliantly. 

Something Kaufman does particularly well in Synecdoche is play with time. The film opens with a radio alarm kicking in at 7:45 a.m., the announcer's voice reminding us that today is September 22nd, the first day of spring (coincidence!). In the breakfast scene that follows, our hero steps past his wife and daughter, opens the fridge, sniffs the milk and declares it sour. The date on the carton is October 20th -- 28 days later. The implication here is that breakfast is the same day, everyday, yet time is accelerating, and suddenly we are chasing it.

Another temporal announcement comes in the last third of the film when our hero is muttering to the assembled cast and crew, when one of them yells, "When are we gonna get an audience in here?" Our hero yells something back, and the yeller yells back at him, "It's been seventeen years!"

There are great moments of humour and sadness in this film, and if I had a critique, it might concern the ebb and flow and placement of these feelings, particularly as we near its end, where once again we have a director trying to squeeze too much in. Other than that, Synecdoche is a finely structured film that, despite popular culture's impatience with anything postmodern (fair to say that postmodern film and literature waned in 2009, with the advent of Twitter?), is in tune with the anxieties of the day.