Synecdoche, New York: A Review

"The greatest compliment an artist can get is the acknowledgement that his work inspired another human being.", observes Black, the protagonist of Orhan Pamuk's much acclaimed novel, "My name is Red". It is with these words that i wish to break my silence from this seemingly permanent hiatus from review writing. After watching Synecdoche,... i felt such a sudden of gush of words that it was impossible not to pick up a piece of paper and write about this movie. Charlie Kauffman's panache for exploring the human psyche once again takes the front seat in his directorial debut, as he gives form to Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage" on celluloid.

Synecdoche,.. is about a playwright, Caden Cotard (played by the ever-dependable Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who is undergoing a mid-life crisis both at work and at home. His workaday life is punctuated by frequent bouts of quirky medical complications that leaves him with the belief that he is dying. After his wife decides to leave him to pursue her career as a miniaturist painter with his daughter, he decides to direct his full attention into making a magnum opus using the money he received by winning a "genius" grant. The film then follows his spiralling obsession to make his play bigger and closer to reality and how this obsession engulfs his whole life.

Self-indulgent in parts, occasionally pretentious, yet so hauntingly original, Synecdoche is an exhibition of a master who has created a masterpiece and yet decides to improvise it with little metaphors. Besides leaving behind metaphors, Kauffman has also managed to maintain the enigma of film, almost reminding us that life doesn't give us all the answers. Some things are just meant to be enjoyed not analysed.

Dark, quriky, and full of surprises, Synecdoche is like an orange seed, just when you thought you picked it up, it slips. Kauffman's hasn't just created a concept, he has created an entirely new form of expressionistic cinema, one which starts off like a tiny snowball rolling from the top of the mountain, it gathers pace, endlessly improvising itself and when it is in conceptual "free-fall", it unfurls itself in its limitless brilliance and yet hides within itself like a giant matroshka doll.

Synecdoche,.. is not a film meant for a sunday afternoon. It demands a little discipline on the viewer's part and for a film of its calibre, it is worth it. This writer has atleast half a dozen great things to tell about this movie but nothing can describe a masterpiece than the piece itself.