Interview. Charlie Kaufman.

"It was my only job for the last five years and I need to have a job! I need to pay my mortgage and the economy is falling apart! What's the world going to be like in two years when I'm done with my next script? Is anyone going to want it? Is anyone going to buy it? Do I even want to put it out there because people have been so mean? A million stupid things are paralyzing me from writing. But it's what I like to do! I like to put something in the world that I feel is honest from my vantage point. That's the kind of decent thing to do in the world. To give people what you think is honest because, otherwise, you might as well be selling soap. In fact, you are selling soap! I don't want to do that. I'm not in that business. I've got to just jump into something and make it about what I'm interested in again. But there's pause. There's always pause at this point."

Yes, that would be Charlie Kaufman. In conversation with Jonathan Marlow. And so, this'll also be an entry on Synecdoche, New York, and it'll pick up where this one leaves off.

"If you traveled the length of John Malkovich's medulla oblongata, hung a sharp left at the desk where Beckett's Krapp recorded his last tape, and walked through the adjoining door of the interstellar hotel room at the end of 2001, you might end up somewhere in the vicinity of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York - a two-hour, loop-de-loop thrill ride so deep into the eternal gloom of its writer and (first-time) director's spotted mind that the Kaufman-scripted Adaptation seems, by comparison, a sun-drenched landscape epic." Scott Foundas in the Voice: "Like that film, Synecdoche is a partly confessional, partly satirical investigation into the creative process - and the notion (or the absurdity thereof) that art can lead to understanding."

"There is little precedent, cinematic or otherwise, for Synecdoche, New York," writes Michael Joshua Rowin. "Sure, early on in his directorial debut, maestro screenwriter Charlie Kaufman namechecks Kafka to prepare us for the increasingly claustrophobic surrealism that engulfs author-surrogate Caden Cotard (a phenomenal Philip Seymour Hoffman), while the character's psychotic, Borgesian obsession with artistic fidelity to real life is approached with the same matter-of-fact bemusement as Buñuel - this isn't entirely unfamiliar territory, at least to begin with. But as it becomes more and more frustrated in its attempt to reconcile personal entropy with creative perfection, Synecdoche proves that even from the ingenious, hilarious and, clearly, tortured mind of the man who might be this country's greatest current contributor to the art of storytelling, it is like nothing else we've quite seen." Also in the L Magazine: Nicolas Rapold talks with Kaufman.

For IFC, Aaron Hillis talks with Hoffman "over espresso and cigarettes about his neuroses, the future of theater and the doppelgängers he's met."

"If a seasoned filmmaker created a work as funny, moving, perplexing, thought-provoking, poignant and powerful as Synecdoche, New York, that alone would be reason for exultation," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "The fact that this little gem - both intimate and epic, cerebral and emotional - marks the directorial debut of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman makes the achievement all the more worthy of celebration."

The Montalbán Gallery in Los Angeles presents Small Miracles: The Paintings of Adele Lack through Sunday, notes Michael Jones. Adele Lack is played in Synecdoche by Catherine Keener.

Updates: "To describe any of the performances in Synecdoche, New York as deadpan presumes comedic intent that may exist on the page - and in effect - but every line is delivered sincerely, and every scene plays out as life or death," writes Eric Hynes at indieWIRE. "As director, Kaufman doesn't have the whimsical or ironic touch of [Michel] Gondry or [Spike] Jonze, making Synecdoche, New York a much heavier affair. Wherever they stand in the funhouse, regardless of absurd dress or situation, Kaufman's actors sell the truth of each particular moment. As a result, and seemingly against all reason, Synecdoche, New York has a crashing emotional power."

"William Horberg, exec producer of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, has a blog, and in today's post he compares his first reading of Kaufman's script - in one of those annoying 'you have to read this in two hours and then hand back immediately to a bonded messenger' sittings - to his first assignment at script coverage back in 1986." And Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay responds with a recollection of his own before segueing into a paragraph from an upcoming interview with Kaufman.

Updates, 10/23: "The directing debut of Charlie Kaufman, our most celebrated screenwriter since Quentin Tarantino, is a reliably Kaufman-esque experience," writes Elbert Ventura in Reverse Shot: "incurably neurotic, relentlessly clever, extravagantly weird. But it is also his most morose, most obsessive, and, with the exception of 2001's Human Nature, least fun work. A diffident invitation to crawl into its maker's addled psyche, Synecdoche, New York is a downer that resonates as much as it repels."

The film "is impeccably acted, inventively designed, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and often devastatingly sad," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "It was also still such a mystery to me after two viewings that I found it hard to trust my own vocabulary to describe what the experience of watching it is actually like. But [in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert] Burton, rambling on 400 years before the fact, seems to nail it, or at least part of it: a life where the madness of creativity and the madness of love/lust are constantly exchanged for one another, to the point where [pleasure] from either is unattainable. But it's also about the fear of death, the impossibility of romance in the absence of longing, the instinct to project our desires on to others and to seek answers about ourselves in mirror images. In other words, as theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) says of his own life's work, 'It's about everything.'"

"An exhilarating authorial confession of loneliness, regret, misery, fear of death and illness, self-doubt, time, space and all other concerns under the moon and stars, it's the story of man wracked by external pustules and internal maladies," writes Nick Schager. "Limited its aims most certainly are not, a sad-sack fictionalized profile that takes a leap down the rabbit hole and morphs - like all of Kaufman's scripts, a point articulated by Caden's early, knowing question, 'Why do I always make it so complicated?' - into a morosely self-aware funhouse of foibles, hang-ups and the (potentially futile) search for comprehension of one's inherently twisted, contradictory nature through artistic invention."

Jürgen Fauth finds it "an overambitious meta-narrative about a director producing an overambitious meta-narrative. From the punny title to the bitter end, Synecdoche, New York is driven by its creator and main character's desperate attempts to address the grand themes - art, love, life, and death. The one self-referential twist that Kaufman didn't intend: both the play-within-the-movie and the movie itself are disastrous failures."

Being John Malkovich." And so on. Armond White in the New York Press.

More interviews with Kaufman: Michael Guillén, Liz Ohanesian (LA Weekly) and Brent Simon (Vulture).

"'Oh, God almighty,' said Hope Davis when asked to describe the film..." Michael Ordoña meets her for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 10/24: "To say that Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now." But the New York Times' Manohla Dargis doesn't; she backs up and starts again and eventually makes her way here: "It's extravagantly conceptual but also tethered to the here and now, which is why, for all its flights of fancy, worlds within worlds and agonies upon agonies, it comes down hard for living in the world with real, breathing, embracing bodies pressed against other bodies. To be here now, alive in the world as it is rather than as we imagine it to be, seems a terribly simple idea, yet it's also the only idea worth the fuss, the anxiety of influence and all the messy rest, a lesson hard won for Caden. Life is a dream, but only for sleepers."

The film " recalls the Jorge Luis Borges story in which the imperial cartographers make a map of the empire so detailed and true-to-life that it takes on the exact dimensions of the territory and ends up covering it entirely," notes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times (as does Manohla Dargis, by the way). "Jean Baudrillard famously inverted the story to illustrate his idea about the 'precession of simulacra,' a postmodern condition in which the representation of something comes before the thing it represents, breaking down the distinction between representation and reality completely. No doubt Kaufman... had both in mind when he outlined the contours of his sprawling, awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, frustrating, hard-to-follow and achingly, achingly sad movie, which might have just as well have been called Being Charlie Kaufman or, better yet, Being Anybody."

"Synecdoche, New York is a very sad movie for two reasons," writes Dana Stevens in Slate. "First off, the story, about a theater director who's sucked into the vortex of his own impossible artistic ambitions, is unremittingly bleak, making for one of the most depressing nondocumentary films you're likely to see, well, ever. But secondly - and in the long run, more movingly - Synecdoche is sad because it's a constant reminder, a ghostly double, of the great movie it could have been."

"The obvious inspiration is Federico Fellini's 8½, in which Guido, a moviemaker with director's block, is beset by memories and fantasies as he dodges all the women in his life, from mother to wife to whore to mistress to muse," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "Kaufman has constructed a most devious puzzle, a labyrinth of an endangered mind. Yet it's one that - thanks in large part to a superb cast, led by Hoffman's unsparing, sympathetic, towering performance - should delight viewers who both work the movie out and surrender to its spell."

At the AV Club, Scott Tobias talks with Kaufman and then writes, "For this master of mindfuckery, Synecdoche, New York probably qualifies as a magnum opus, since it essentially multiplies Adaptation by an exponential factor and thus grows into a snarling, ungainly beast of self-reflexive absurdities. It's a movie that doesn't just benefit from repeat viewings but practically requires them, though Kaufman, for all his brilliance, fails to make the prospect as inviting as it should be."

"A note is struck in Synecdoche, New York - perhaps the one that commences Jon Brion and Deanna Storey's smoky-'n'-sad after-hours ballad 'Little Person,' which closes writer/director Charlie Kaufman's latest dive into the gaping, unforgiving maw of existence." Keith Uhlich at UGO: "The tone, always in a morose minor key, remains unvaried for a good two hours until Brion and Storey grant the proceedings (over a blessed fade-to-white) some retrospective resonance. Not to say that the previous 120 minutes of poseur artistry (begetting 4 minutes of genuine invention) is improved so much as given a finish (an elating flourish) it doesn't deserve."

Chris Barsanti at PopMatters: "It's performance art as civilization-annihilating Godzilla, the play that ate Manhattan, a theater of life that makes theater of the absurd seem like little more than art school fun and games."

"Kaufman's latest (which he also directs, haltingly) has its tenterhooks planted in the warm, fuzzy heart of comic neuroticism," writes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. "[I]'s all essentially a picture of buzzy, NPR-listening domesticity."

"If ever there were a movie to make a critic throw up his hands and mutter, 'It is what it is,' this is it (what it is)," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "There are some notable differences between his approach and those of his previous directors, differences which also make it a tougher film to experience."

Via Movie City News, Rex Reed, the John McCain of movie critics: "I have hated every incomprehensible bucket of pretentious, idiot swill ever written by this cinematic drawbridge troll. But nothing that has belched forth from his word processor so far prepared me for a bottom feeder like this."

Online listening tip. Kaufman's a guest on Fresh Air.

Online listening and/or reading tip. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir talks with Kaufman.

Steve Dollar talks with Kaufman for Paste: "It's been said that he enjoys doing interviews as much as a cat enjoys a bath, but once he gets going, he responds at passionate length, his straightforward replies gradually becoming more anecdotal—even though he guards against inquiries into his private life. 'I try consistently to test the water further each time I write something. I felt like I was doing that this time. There is decidedly nothing cute in this movie. No cute contrivance or reveal that makes it OK, that allows you as an audience to escape and get out, to say, "Oh, look how clever it is." This movie doesn't do that. It doesn't give you that. It leaves you there at the end where it leaves you.'"

"One of the most interesting aspects of Synecdoche, New York is the way that it so thoroughly displays Kaufman's signatures (meta-narrative, dark humor, fumbling relationships, deadpan weirdness, melancholy, the conviction that being married to Catherine Keener would be kind of miserable) without employing his usual killer hooks, like an eight-minute pop song without a chorus," writes Jesse Hassenger for the L Magazine.

Howard Feinstein talks with Kaufman for indieWIRE.

Online viewing tip. Ted Zee has Kaufman and Hoffman on Charlie Rose.

Update, 10/25: Via Movie City News, ST VanAirsdale at Defamer: "Charlie Kaufman's directing debut Synecdoche, New York is the most inaccessible, challenging, infuriating, stupefying, heartbreaking film of 2008. It's also the best American movie we've seen this year, and as noted here this morning, it's required viewing this weekend for anyone who wants to be on our good side. Or history's good side, for that matter - and here are five reasons why."

"Charlie Kaufman's new picture is either his 2001, or his Lady in the Water," writes Justin Stewart for Stop Smiling. "Several days after seeing it, I'm still not sure where on that epic measuring stick it notches. It has the pleasures and pitfalls of any far-reaching movie/album/book that goes 'all the way,' its maker through wearing 'kid's gloves' and ready to give it 'everything he's got.' A risk of great pretension is inevitable in the gambit, and the resultant work typically encourages overrating by its admirers and shrill underrating by detractors. A stubborn wallowing in excessive morose self-pity, the staleness of some of the visual gags, and an incoherent, draggy last third ensure Synecdoche, New York as no Finnegans Wake, but its undeniable heady crackle and persistent curiosity leave no doubt that it's something more than his Use Your Illusion."

For Scott Von Doviak, this is "the most ambitious, challenging, frustrating and thrilling American movie since I'm Not There... maybe even since Mulholland Drive. Those two films are good points of reference, actually; if you hated them both, Synecdoche probably isn't a movie for you."

Updates, 10/26: Rachel Abramowitz talks with Kaufman for the Los Angeles Times.

Online listening tip. "It's safe to say that you are an idea man. So I must ask you: to what degree do you worry about an idea?" Ed Champion talks with Kaufman, too.

James Ponsoldt talks with Kaufman for Filmmaker.

Updates, 10/27: "With so much screen time being allotted to Caden's bad marriage and pustular health problems, his majestic production doesn't get going properly until the second half of the film, and by then we don't care enough (worse still, we don't know enough, such is the vagueness of its guiding rubric) to mind whether it triumphs or flops," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "Compare Dennis Potter's great mini-series of the 1980s, The Singing Detective, and you will see much the same setup - a wry leading man with a skin disease, inspired by a furious creative itch - rendered with unstinting vigor.... If you want to show a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, go right ahead, but give that hour all the life you can."

"It's a film full of ideas so ambitious and astounding, that the final product could certainly never meet its full potential (much like the film's characters themselves)," writes Matt Dentler. "That said, it comes closer than it should, and ultimately succeeds as a powerful and resonant near-masterpiece."

Online listening and viewing tip. At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth has video of Kaufman being overrun by dogs as Kurt Anderson interviews him for Studio 360.

Updates, 10/28: Ben Walters for the Guardian: "[S]ynonymous with both ambition and indifference, novelty and decadence, the Big Apple has always tempted dreamers to bite off more than they can chew. If I can make it there, the song goes, I'll make it anywhere, and it's a deliciously Kaufman-esque leap to have Caden resolve literally to make it there - to make a New York within New York. It's neither surprising nor unsatisfying that his project proves too much to bear; and yet, being inexhaustible, irreducible and ultimately unattainable, it does justice to its subject all the same."

Walter Chaw talks with Kaufman for Film Freak Central.

Updates, 10/29: "How to describe the films of Charlie Kaufman... Ingmar Bergman with laughs?" C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark: "Close, but that makes Kaufman sound too much like Woody Allen, a useful comparison maybe, but one that deemphasizes an essential aspect of Kaufman, his fascination with time and memory. And Kaufman is far more tied to Surrealism/Theater of the Absurd than Woody ever was. I'd prefer to say Kaufman is Woody Allen filtered through Alain Resnais."

Andrew Sarris, writing in the New York Observer, understands "that some viewers will consider the film the worst they have ever seen, while others will judge it to be one of the best of the current crop of attractions. I find myself somewhere in the middle, impressed by its originality, but depressed by its lack of coherence and narrative flow."

"Re-reading what I wrote about other films written by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), I see that I've compared his work to origami pieces, and I still think that's apt." Bryant Frazer: "You can lose yourself in their multifarious layers and folds - and sometimes, when imprecise fingers and thumbs finish modeling the creature, the thing doesn't really match what you saw on the instruction page."

Posted by dwhudson at October 22, 2008 8:05 AM