A man sits on a sofa. He is slightly balding with tufts of hair forming an easily invaded hedge around the crown on his head. His face has the maniacal gleam of nervous tension. In front of him are two sheets of paper. On one sheet are a few sentences followed by a grouping of stars; on the other, they are followed by a set of numbers. His eyes flick across both papers; despair, joy, terror, and triumph emanate from them.
The man is Charlie Kaufman, and it’s October 27th, 2008, three days after the opening weekend of Synecdoche, New York, his directorial debut.
Failure is baked into the very centre of Synecdoche, New York. The opening sequence depicting breakfast with the main character Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), his wife Adele, and his four-year-old daughter Olive is a subtle series of failures on Caden’s part that are presented as ordinary but in actuality are manifestations of elemental personal problems. When reading the paper, Caden mistakenly believes Harold Pinter has died, when in fact he has won the Nobel Prize for Literature (perhaps a reference to this brutally hysterical mistake on British news).
Adele (Catherine Keener) makes a breakfast of oatmeal for their daughter, which she flat-out rejects. Caden, when attempting to shave, somehow contrives to break the tap, which zips like a rusting bullet at his forehead, leaving a deep cut requiring stitches. He then, in a repeated theme, speaks to his daughter with no parental filter, as if she is an adult, and scares when comparing plumbing to capillary action in the blood.
Most despairingly, however, is how Kaufman shows the total collapse of marital intimacy between Caden in a single, few-second sequence. Their first interaction is saying good morning to each other in the detached, glacial tone of strangers in the street while not making eye contact as they move past one another to different rooms of their apartment. Caden ignores Adele’s request for him to answer the phone; his first full sentence to her, completely ignoring the chaos of the morning routine with a small child, is “I don’t feel well.” Caden exists in his own bubble; his first words begin with the iron bar of I, expressing a kind of defeated solipsism that seems to permeate every moment of his life.
Synecdoche, New York is defined by the constant failure in Caden’s life—both tiny and colossal misfortunes and mistakes. The film’s central narrative is Caden attempting to recreate his life in painstaking minutiae within a Brobdignanian setting. He wants to produce a play, a gigantic theatre piece, because “theatre is the truth not yet spoken. It’s the moment before death.” He wants to “soak the audience and players in it alike” and will not settle for anything less than the “brutal truth. Brutal!”
What constitutes failure? That is a puzzling question when thinking about the effect Synecdoche, New York had on Charlie Kaufman’s career. Between 1999 and 2008, he wrote four films, all except one (2001’s forgotten Human Nature) made decent money; he was nominated for three Oscars and one won for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He managed to place himself within the “mainstream” by revolutionising screenwriting aimed at larger audiences; in many ways, he brought the mainstream to him rather than stepping into himself.
After the commercial and critical success of Eternal Sunshine, Kaufman was given the keys to a reasonably-sized castle. Sony Pictures Classics gave him $20 million and the freedom to direct for the first time. When the film premiered at Cannes, it received a huge standing ovation, and Kaufman, in a rare moment of hubris, thought he had a monster hit on his hands. I think it is fair to say he didn’t. On its opening weekend, it played in just 9 U.S. theatres, making just $172,194. It took another month to get anything resembling a wide release, and even then, it was just 119 theatres. By comparison, Eternal Sunshine opened in 1,353 cinemas and took an impressive $2,642,97. Synecdoche, New York was, in the cultured parlance of film economics, a box-office bomb. It took just $4 million against its $20 million budget. And in the 15 years since its release, that failure has haunted Kaufman. Kaufman has released just two films and one novel since 2008. One of those films, 2015’s achingly sad masterpiece Anomalisa, also lost money. It’s hard to find data for book sales, but his 2020 novel, the 720-page post-modern behemoth Antkind, probably didn’t sell as well as Sally Rooney.
However, these figures do not tell the whole story of the response to the film or Kaufman’s career in general. Synecdoche opened to five-star reviews in The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian and was repeatedly praised in many other publications. There were some dissenting voices; revered critic Stephanie Zacharek wrote that “Kaufman's overarching vision is a lot less interesting than the small insights he gathers along the way. This is what happens when life imitates art, and blows it.”
Synecdoche is not the first film to be lauded by critics and ignored by the public; there is probably a film released every week that could be described as such, but the sheer critical weight that has built upon it is something else.
How can you describe a film as a failure when it is voted the 7th best film of the century by The Guardian? Or when the most famous film critic in American history, Roger Ebert, gives it his Film of the Decade award. Of course, the idea that the success of a film can solely be defined by its commercial success is both reductive and wrong, but the discrepancy between the commercial and critical response, combined with the intense negative effect on Kaufman’s career, renders this a unique case.
Synecdoche’s commercial failings completely changed the trajectory of Kaufman’s career. He went from a writer releasing a film every couple of years to becoming a Salinger-esque recluse. This was not of his own desire; in an interview, he described how the period between 2008 and 2015 “was a really difficult time for me. I was desperate to get things made. But [Synecdoche] lost a fortune, and that was why, in a nutshell, [I didn’t release anything].”
You could argue that Caden’s play is a complete failure of imagination. He may recreate his entire life within this magical realist landscape of towering skylines or fake streets bustling with the minutely choreographed hum of hundreds of ever-expanding actors, but is this a great imaginative leap or simply memory mimetically rendered? Does true imagination, and the “brutal truth” that Caden effectively destroy’s his life in search of, not exist in the inch between fiction and biography?
Albert Camus, the great existentialist and clear influence on Kaufman’s writing, once said that "fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” Caden thinks that by abandoning fiction and creating a play in which each character has another character playing that character and another playing that character playing that character in an ever-increasing metafictional absurdity, he is achieving a truth that "fiction," in its many guises, could never achieve.
But the truth is that when something attempts to be about everything, it ultimately becomes about nothing because when you try to point at everything, you are really pointing at nothing. Joyce understood this, as did Beckett, but Caden fails to because he becomes trapped inside his own chimaera of artistic dogma. His life is filled with failure—his health, marriages, parenthood, even his own inability to perceive time.
By the end of the play, Caden removes himself as director and swaps roles with Anneette Benning’s cleaning character, who becomes the original “second Caden," who then begins to instruct Caden on his every movement and emotion. Caden, after effectively creating a second version of his own life, removes any agency from himself and allows the failures of this second life to be constructed by someone else. His life is no longer his own, and therefore, his mistakes are no longer his.
Synecdoche, New York is a masterpiece, a transcendent film that will in the future sit amongst Tokyo Story or 2001 or Jeanne Dielman in the cinematic canon. However, in creating this masterpiece, Kaufman was exiled into obscurity, into the realms of academic discourse and cult devotion.
Does that make the film a failure? Maybe if Kaufman regains his place in the Hollywood or independent machines, this will seem like a blip before a creative renaissance. In some ways, this exile wasn’t due to the fact that he made a bad film that flopped; it was because he made one that was too good, too weird, and too challenging for the audience it needed to reach.
It’s a strange feat of irony, perhaps one Kaufman would write himself, that to make one of the great films of all time would derail a career so brutally. But maybe the real truth that Kaufman shows us in the film is that failure is one of life’s constants, something that none of us can ever escape, like death, taxes, and how existing in fantasy can never save you from the true reality of life.
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