day 1 - Synecdoche, New York

Hello, my name is Shawn and I'm a film addict. I think everyone likes films though, I've only ever meet one person who said they didn't and I think that was just pretentious posturing. However, loving film does not place me in exclusive company either. A quick check of film blogs found on Google turns up a number just south of the national debt.

To carve out my own tiny little niche in the vast world of film bloggers I have chosen to combine my love of film with every other aspect of my life. Since I do not review professionally or adhere to an editor, I am free to shift my focus, like a conversation with a good friend, from topic to topic. I think any good film is the starting point of a good conversation. Each film will serve as our jumping off point and from there on everything is fair game!

Well, let's begin...

The reason I have begun this project will be evident over the course of the days, weeks and months to follow, but let's start with a recent event and the subject of my first post.

A couple of months ago on a nondescript Sunday night I watched the spectacularly intricate, overwhelmingly grand and subtly simple Synecdoche, New York by Charlie Kaufman. The sixth discourse on the life of the mind by Kaufman, in his directorial debut, provides a brilliant depiction of the arc of a life. It's not just the life of the main character, Caden Cotard, portrayed by the sublime Phillip Seymour Hoffman, or the life of the writer/director Kaufman. No, this is life as it occurs for all of us regardless of our gender, status or location.

Caden is a theater director whose Death of a Salesman with a twist - he uses actors in their twenties for the cast - wins him a MacArthur fellow genius grant. Kaufman doesn't spend much time here, but the choice of the play and casting it with young actors is an important prologue to the movie. The play speaks to the confusion we all face about who we are, what we want and how successful we are in our endeavors, which is the basic subtext of the film. For the most part, our lives only make sense in retrospect, when we can see the trail we have walked to reach where we stand.

Using young actors is pointedly absurd since no one in their twenties would carry the weight of 40 years of failed decisions and missed opportunities and see how it has shaped their lives. So too is the next decision made by Caden, to use his grant, as he tells his odd therapist, the under seen Hope Davis, to "make something big and true and tough, to finally put my real self into something" despite acknowledging he doesn't know who his true self is. Ostensibly, he decides to make a massive theater piece about the communal experience of living.

Unfortunately, Caden is somewhat obsessed with growing old and dying. What is played out as Caden lives his life and directs his play is the realization that this film is about the solipsistic nature of our minds. I read in a self help book about the 18/40/60 rule. At 18 we worry about what everyone else thinks of us. At 40 we begin to no longer care what others think of us and at 60 we realize that no one else was really thinking about us in the first place. All of us on this planet share the same life. When we are young we explore ourselves and who we are, as we age we seek answers to where we fit in and who we want to become and as we age further still we can see the arc of our lives, our successes and failures.I have purposely elected to concentrate on the the theme of this movie and not the acting, direction, cinematography, editing etc. They are all wonderful, even more so considering they come from a first time director. For me, what was more important is how the tone of the film made me feel. For days after seeing it I could not shake the introspection it forced upon me. Even now I find myself going back to watch individual scenes over and over, searching for more pearls of wisdom and wondering how I can use them to make better use of the lessons my own life can teach my future self.

My favorite film reviewer and personal saint, Roger Ebert, has placed Synecdoche, New York at the top of his movies for the decade. It's a mercurial list but I love this choice as no other film this decade has moved me as much. His blog has a phenomenal take on the film, especially the importance of the title, which I will confess was one of the first things I looked up after watching this film.

I'd be remiss if I left out the great soundtrack to the film by Jon Brion, who also worked on Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, another favorite I will review in the future. Specifically, there is a song played during Caden's attempted connection with Hazel, the surprising Samantha Morton, and over the end credits. The song "Little Person", co-written by Kaufman and Brion, is beautiful, haunting and its lyrics a perfect companion piece to the film.

At the beginning of the film there's an amazing line from Caden's first wife, the wonderfully named Adele Lack (the wonderful Catherine Keener). It's just slipped in, like a jab you don't notice that puts you on your heels, but it provides valuable information about Caden's personality and one of Kaufman's key messages. As she explains why she isn't a fan of him just directing the work of others, and what she views as him wasting his talent, she offhandedly states, 

 "What are you leaving behind? You act as if you have forever to figure it out."

One down...