Synecdoche, New York, round 1.

"As the Oscar-friendly writer of Being John Malkovich (nominated), Adaptation, (nominated) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (won) [Charlie] Kaufman has already earned a significant amount of acclaim," writes David Carr in the New York Times. "Driven by the concept of a synecdoche - roughly, a part representing the whole — he takes one man's fear of irrelevance and drapes it across a vast landscape of human concerns.... On the telephone in San Francisco just before an all-night flight to Spain, Mr Kaufman was happy to talk about anything, except what [Synecdoche, New York] 'means.'"

"Imagine The Truman Show rewritten by Samuel Beckett and directed by Luis Buñuel and you'll get some idea of what Kaufman is aiming for here," suggests Ambrose Heron.

Updated through 10/20.

Jonathan Rosenbaum finds that "it seems more like an illustration of his script than a full-fledged movie, proving how much he needs a Spike Jonze or a Michel Gondry to realize his surrealistic conceits."

Victoria Large at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "It follows the travails of Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard, a regional theater director who is suddenly bestowed with a Macarthur Foundation Genius Grant and sets out to create a piece of theater that's entirely honest, a part that signifies the largest of wholes - life, love, death, everything. Especially death.... It's a heavy film and a long one, and it's absolutely exhausting."

The final sequence is as inexplicably cathartic as the ending of INLAND EMPIRE," writes Chicagoist Rob Christopher. "This is an aggressively intelligent and bizarre puzzlebox comedy that'll have you questioning the nature of reality as you exit the theater."

"No doubt, it's got some great ideas," writes Mark Haslam at Vinyl Is Heavy, "ideas about space and time which seem natural to film; but they're not put together in any cohesive way. Things are jumbled, uneven. Leaving the theater, I couldn't escape the thought of what would've been if Kaufman had given things more time, allowed the form to unfold itself, gradually over time, so that we feel time slipping away from us as it slips away from Caden, so that the approach of the film's end really is that gradual approach of Death."

"I have never had as emotional a reaction to any of the thousands of movies I have watched in my lifetime as I had to Synecdoche, New York." Aaron Dobbs writes an open letter to Charlie Kaufman.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Update: "The artistic psyche has never been more joylessly explored," writes Fernando F Croce in Slant, but: "Synecdoche is a reminder of what a dead-end brilliant screenwriting conceits can be when left by themselves on the screen.... Freed from the influence of collaborators, Kaufman wallows in his thematic fixations like a dieting matron lunging at a box of bonbons."

Updates, 10/20: "This epic dream play with its leaps through time and space, its characters and shadow characters, poses a momentous question: Uh... well... I'm not sure what question the movie is posing. The answer, though, is definitely 'Death.'" David Edelstein in New York: "The best thing to do with one's spatial-temporal bewilderment is get over it and go with the free-associational flow: Synecdoche, New York cannot be diagrammed."

Online viewing tip. FilmCatcher interviews Kaufman.

At VF Daily, Jim Windolf tries interviewing Kaufman as Brian Lamb.

Continues here.

Posted by dwhudson at October 19, 2008 6:12 AM