Synedoche, New York

The highly gifted screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s latest film “Synedoche, New York”, which he also directed, is a film with experimental tones, that watches like a weird fusion of a college film class and Existential Philosophy 101. It utterly lacks any Dramatic, Comedic, or even Intellectual Appeal; instead it is a nearly unbearable two hours of listless dialogue, filled with cringe-inducingly bad lines and terrible acting. It is painful to watch, and earned the distinction of being the first ever movie that it was impossible for me to sit through; I turned it off at the hour mark.

Part of its problem is that it rings so shallow and gimmicky, making it heavy handed. Kaufman went so far that the lines weren’t even visible anymore, lines that he’s usually smart enough to only flirt with. So the viewer is forced to watch such pointlessly silly gimmicks as the burning house, and the main characters self-insertion into utterly stupid and dry commercials, all of which makes the film seem to insult my intelligence by playing around with such lowest common denominator gimmicks and reminds me that it is so important in film to not do something just for the hell of it. Well-developed human characters are not a thing you should expect to see in this film, which is attempting to create an elaborate existentialist metaphor for the way in which we create and manage our lives. Nor should you expect good dialogue that provides some tiny shred of something, anything, to hang onto and attempt to get some form of a cinematic experience from, and that was perhaps the most shocking part about it, considering how wonderfully dialogue driven Kaufman’s previous scripts have been, particularly “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Adaptation”. But the dialogue here in this film is horrific, it’s dead on arrival and hopelessly unrealistic.

Its other problem, the one that truly makes it unwatchable, is its lifelessness. This film was never alive, it was never a living, satisfying, breathing work of intellectual discourse, and therefore in its heavy-handedness it fails spectacularly to create a work that surprises with ambiguous and complex truths. What it does is beat you over the head with a dry and unrelentingly dark, (but very simplistic and shallow), tone. This film is too Kaufmanesque, truthfully. He’s always pushing the limits to where his own personal neurotic tendencies are almost annoying, but here with no restraint Kaufman went crazy, literally and figuratively I suppose. Whereas all of his characters are unnaturally shy, reticent, and quite frankly neurotic to the point of madness, (on the part of the viewer), they still have redeeming qualities, such as interesting dialogue and real feelings, which makes them wonderful and interesting to get involved with, here there is none of that, they are dredging characters plodding around empty and soulless on the screen. So while there is always a certain unrealistic and cheesy post-modern aspect to his films, this one goes a step farther and it makes it impossible to watch and get anything out of. Beyond that it is simply impossible to sympathize with this sort of character; he’s simply annoying and unlikeable and not in a good way but in way that screams “I’m a metaphorical character meant to make a point”.

As someone who did not like Camus’s stranger for the same reason, I obviously won’t put up with it here; it defiles my entire perspective of art and sense of aesthetic beliefs on what art is supposed to do. Art is not here as an exercise in how much we can obfuscate what we mean, nor is it here to see how much we can dehumanize ourselves. Kaufman’s New French Novel experiment of a film is crap for me.

There are scenes where the actors involved seemed quite aware they are in a very deep and intellectual movie and they act the dredging, solemn, lethargic roles. It’s also a flaw that this film has not an ounce of comedy in it; almost all great films must have some sort of humor, must realize that life is rarely so dark and depressing as it is in film, that people will always find a way to laugh. Some films don’t need this, but this one did, and by not having it, it became one of those dreaded “Takes itself too seriously” films which manages to acerbate and complement its already vast problems.

In closing, the movie could be completely and accurately described as a enervated, hopelessly artsy and overwhelmingly obtuse film with no redeeming value whatsoever anywhere in the film.