Synec­doche, New York

Is Synec­doche, New York self-indul­gent? Per­haps. It’s most def­i­nite­ly self-con­scious. And self-reflex­ive, too. It’s over com­pli­cat­ed and infu­ri­at­ing. It’s arch, man­nered and pre­ten­tious. Because this is Char­lie Kauf­man, and over com­pli­cat­ed, self-reflex­ive and infu­ri­at­ing isn’t just what he does, it’s who he is.

But some­where inside the hyper-aware­ness, the metaphors, the in-jokes, the sly smarts and clever quirks is a real film. An ambi­tious and strange and beau­ti­ful film of bold but elu­sive truths.

Caden Cotard (Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man) is a the­atre direc­tor and hypochon­dri­ac. His wife, Adele (Cather­ine Keen­er), has left him to purse her career as an artist in Berlin, tak­ing their daugh­ter, Olive, and her friend Maria (Jen­nifer Jason Leigh). After a failed affair with his assis­tant, Hazel (Saman­tha Mor­ton), Caden takes his troop to a vast ware­house in New York to work on a piece of art that will ​“stare truth in the face”.

As two decades slip by, Caden will recre­ate a mod­el of the city inside the ware­house, where a con­cen­tric cast of actors will play the actors play­ing the actors play­ing the actors in the sto­ry of his, their and our lives.

This is bare­ly to scratch the sur­face of a film whose struc­ture is at once as self-con­tained as a Russ­ian doll, and as free form as a fever dream. Its near­est con­tem­po­rary is Har­mo­ny Korine’s Mis­ter Lone­ly, but a bet­ter ref­er­ence point might be Lynch’s Mul­hol­land Dri­ve. While it’s not as dark as that night­mare, Synec­doche is pow­ered by the same kind of rig­or­ous intel­li­gence and uncom­pro­mis­ing vision.

But a vision of what, exact­ly? This is a film that doesn’t yield its secrets eas­i­ly. Instead, they’re buried some­where beneath, or per­haps with­in, the meta-tex­tu­al lay­ers stretched across this strange, sprawl­ing canvas.

Kauf­man is obsessed with the pow­er of arti­fice. And it’s not just that giant mod­el city – the film is full of odd and arrest­ing details that invite then defy expla­na­tion. Look close­ly, and Kaufman’s chronol­o­gy is as cracked and splin­tered as his futur­is­tic city streets. A Zep­pelin is ren­dered in all-too-obvi­ous CGI.

Actors age with painful­ly trans­par­ent pros­thet­ics. A children’s car­toon echoes Caden’s sub­con­scious. Fas­cist clowns herd cit­i­zens onto bus­es for ​‘Fun­land’. Eye drops replace tears. A petal falls from a tat­too. A burn­ing house punc­tu­ates the film like a ques­tion mark.

But just as you’re begin­ning to lose your­self com­plete­ly in this world of actors, fakes and fac­sim­i­le, the arti­fice begins to assume its own kind of truth. When there are so many acts of inven­tion, the dif­fer­ence between the ​‘real’ and the ​‘unre­al’ even­tu­al­ly shades into nothingness.

What­ev­er you make of it, you have to admire Kaufman’s bold, bound­less ambi­tion. Is Synec­doche the sto­ry of a man los­ing his grip on real­i­ty, or find­ing his place in it for the first time? Is it about a decline into mad­ness? Or is it a blind leap into the unknown and unknow­able depths of the soul?

Cer­tain­ly, it’s a film that keeps itself at a dis­tance, and that makes it dif­fi­cult to respond to on an emo­tion­al as well as an intel­lec­tu­al lev­el. Anx­ious and jit­tery, Kaufman’s direc­tion is con­sis­tent with his writ­ing. Scenes are short and rest­less; dia­logue is packed tight togeth­er, spat out of the mouth like rot­ten fruit.

Some peo­ple will hate it, and those peo­ple will be impos­si­ble to per­suade. But all art is van­i­ty. To harangue any film­mak­er for self-indul­gence doesn’t make sense. ​“You nev­er real­ly looked at your­self,” says Hazel to Caden. But Char­lie Kauf­man did. In Synec­doche he’s looked at him­self, at life and at death long and hard and hon­est­ly. And he deserves to be indulged.