“I’m sure Being John Malkovich would be regarded as a work of genius on whatever planet it was written.”–possibly apocryphal comment from a movie studio rejection letter

DIRECTED BY: Spike Jonze

FEATURING: John Cusack, Catherine Keener, Cameron Diaz, John Malkovich

PLOT: Craig Schwartz is an unemployed puppeteer who performs a marionette version of “Abelard and Heloise” on street corners for passersby.  His wife Lotte convinces him to get a job, and he winds up working as a file clerk on floor seven and a half of a Manhattan office building, where he falls for sultry and scheming coworker Maxine.  When he discovers a portal hidden behind a file cabinet that leads into the mind of John Malkovich, Maxine devises a plan to sell tickets to “be” the title actor, but things become extremely complicated when a confused love quadrangle develops between Craig, his wife, Maxine, and Malkovich…

BACKGROUND:

• The feature film debut for both director Spike Jonze and sreenwriter Charlie Kaufman (who would work together again on Adaptation).
• In Being John Malkovich John Cusak re-enacts the story of Abelard and Heloise with puppets; the title Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is taken from Alexander Pope’s poem on the same subject, “Eloisa to Abelard.”
• John Malkovich reportedly liked the script, but didn’t want to star in it and requested the filmmakers cast another actor as the celebrity who has a portal into his head; eventually he relented and agreed to appear in the film.
• The film was nominated for three Oscars: Keener for Best Supporting Actress, Jonze for Best Director and Kaufman for Best Original Screenplay.  As is usually the case with uncomfortably weird films, it won nothing.
• The film was originally produced by PolyGram, who were unhappy with the dailies they were getting from Jonze and threatened to shut production down; however, before they could make good on the threat the company was bought out by Universal, and Jonze was able to complete the movie in the ensuing confusion.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The recursive (and hilariously illogical) result of John Malkovich daring to enter the portal that leads inside John Malkovich’s head.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make a movie

Original trailer for Being John Malkovich

about a secret portal that allows anyone who crawls through it to see the world through actor John Malkovich’s eyes for fifteen minutes before being spat out on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike and not end up with a weird result.  The inhabitants of Being John Malkovich, like the denizens of a dream, don’t recognize the secret portals leading into others minds, the half-floor work spaces designed for little people, and the chimps with elaborate back stories as being at all unusual, and their matter-of-fact attitudes only throw the absurdity into stark relief.

COMMENTS: Synecdoche, New York may be Charlie Kaufman‘s weirdest script, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind his most emotionally affecting, and Adaptation his cleverest, but he’s never written anything funnier than his debut, Being John Malkovich.  From the moment Craig Schwartz steps onto the 7 1/2th floor, stooping so he doesn’t hit the ceiling, talks to executive liaison who insists his name is Juarez, interviews with the boss who insists he has a speech impediment, and watches the orientation video where an 19th century industrialist (who talks like a pirate) explains he built this floor for his short-statured wife so there would be one place on earth where her and her “accursed kind” could live in peace, Being John Malkovich demonstrates its devotion to deadpan absurdist yuks.  Add in running  jokes at the expense of puppeteers, a chimp undergoing psychoanalysis, and the low comedy of John Malkovich being struck on the head by a beer can thrown from a passing vehicle, and about a dozen other crazed gags, and you have a movie that’s like what might happen if someone found a cache of old unused Monty Python sketches and miraculously crafted them into all into a coherent narrative.

Not to take away from director Spike Jonze’s work on Malkovich—he orchestrates the ensemble cast beautifully and has the good sense not to inject too much of himself into the story—but any halfway competent director could take a Kaufman script and make, at the minimum, a near masterpiece.  Kaufman is the only writer working today whose scripts are unique enough to completely dictate feels of the movie; it doesn’t matter if Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry or Kaufman himself directs, the result is still as immediately recognizable as Kaufman as is the style of a Kubrick or a Hitchcock.  All the movies contain the same slanted, dream-logic humor; the neurotic intellectual protagonists; the appealingly weird “why didn’t I ever think of that?” premises; the unpredictable constructions leading to ingenious conclusions; and the glancing philosophical implications that allow the movies to be read and enjoyed on multiple levels.  There’s also the metafictional conceit that inhabits 75% of Kaufman’s scripts (excepting only Eternal Sunshine), the constant recursive subtext that this story is actually about the process of creating this story.  These singularities act like anti-theft devices making it impossible for directors to hijack Kaufman’s vision; if they try to turn off the story’s perfectly planned path, the vehicle would stop working and shut down.

Being John Malkovich touches lightly on philosophical issues—as Schwartz says, the ability to enter someone else’s head and see life through their eyes “raises a metaphysical can of worms”—but it doesn’t explore them seriously.  Take, for example, the result when Malkovich dares to risk trying out the portal into his own mind.  The answer to the intriguing question of what happens when someone enters into their own consciousness as an observer ends up as just another surreal joke (how does Malkovich end up at a restaurant?)  Kaufman was probably wise not to delve to deeply into the unanswerable questions of the mind/body paradox.  But he does explore another issue dearer to his heart: the role of the writer in creating a character.  Schwartz’s marionettes (which he uses as an escape, a chance to live a more interesting life and creepily fulfill romantic fantasies when he has a puppet Schwartz seduce a puppet Maxine) are a metaphor for the portal into Malkovich, and vice versa.  And both are a metaphor for the way a writer controls that simulacrum of person, the onscreen character, by pulling the strings on the script to make them dance and speak.  Kaufman is self-deprecating about the role of the puppeteer/author: after Schwartz is beaten up (again)  for his inappropriately erotic sidewalk show and Lotte asks him why he puts himself through this, his answer is a fatalistic, “I’m a puppeteer.”  The substitution of the slightly ridiculous “puppeteer” for the pompous “artist” suggests an author uncomfortable with his own role, but willing to laugh about it.  It’s one of the film’s subtle meta-jokes that Kaufman is the only one who actually gets to enjoy the experience of “being John Malkovich” that Maxine promises to clients who answer her newspaper ad.

Kaufman’s Malkovich, of course, isn’t the real Malkovich: I’ll bet the real Malkovich doesn’t call up Charlie Sheen to talk him down after he’s suffered a psychotic identity crisis.  The real Malkovich was married at the time of filming, but he’s a bachelor in this story. John Malkovich was brilliant selection to play the man with the secret portal.  The tunnel behind the file cabinet could have led into anyone; it didn’t have to be a real person.  Choosing an actor for the vessel gives the story another layer, affording anyone anxious to seize upon some sort of social relevance as an excuse for liking the movie the opportunity to discuss how it addresses the issue of contemporary celebrity worship (even though this delightfully superficial movie doesn’t address that concern any more thoroughly than any of the other conundrums it raises).  But Malkovich is a weird, random choice.  As an actor, he’s ever so slightly effeminate, but there’s a gonzo gleam in his eye that suggests he might go off the hook at any moment.   A great but enigmatic performer, Malkovich had a distant, vaguely cultured public person; he’s never in the tabloids, but he’s the sort of actor you might expect to show up on Charlie Rose’s late night PBS show discussing his latest project.  He’s recognizable, but not so famous that anyone he meets in the movie can remember the name of something he was in.  It’s a publicist’s dream that Malkovich relented and agreed to appear in the film and permanently lend it his name.  The script has tremendous fun with his sub-major celebrity, making a joke not only out of the fact that people on the street can’t remember his roles but also of how ordinary and boring his private life is (people pay good money to experience what it’s like to order towels over the phone as John Malkovich!)

Malkovich is game to laugh at himself, which makes him all the more appealing, but he also does a fantastic job in a multifaceted performance that requires him to play not only a comic version of himself but also a man in the throes of being possessed by someone inside his head, Richard III, and John Cusack.  The actor proves himself worthy of the faith Kaufman put in him, knocking the ball out of the park.

Other performances are equally stellar.  Cusack is suitably pathetic as the romantic but spineless artist with a bad case of unrequited love.  The two female leads do an interesting switcheroo; Cameron Diaz is a gorgeous actress who acts pretty here, and Catherine Keener is a pretty actress who acts gorgeous here.  Their performances suggest that sex appeal is a matter of attitude rather than looks.  Diaz wears baggy clothes, little makeup and an unflattering perm.  Doting on the menagerie of pet store rejects she populates her apartment with to make up for her unrequited need for a child, she starts the film as an agreeably frumpy mate for Cusack, but the discovery of the portal unhinges her and turns her into a romantic schemer.  Keener, who looks like she has too many teeth for her mouth whenever she flashes her sarcastic smile, is a man-eater who makes herself sexually irresistible by being impossible to impress.  She always has a cruel putdown and a selfish plot ready to deploy, and only gets off on control—a fact that Cusack eventually picks up on in order to control her.  Orson Bean and Mary Kay Place have hilarious turns as the horny executive geezer and the secretary with a hearing impairment, respectively.  Besides the great acting by the featured cast, there are a host of cameos—from the unnoticeable (Jonze and fellow director David Fincher) to the eyeblink (Brad Pitt, Wynona Ryder, Andy Dick, and then-popular boy-band Hanson) to the amusing (Charlie Sheen, who tweaks his own image even more impishly than Malkovich does)—making Being John Malkovich a minor feast for fans of celebrity-spotting.

Being John Malkovich sets up its absurd scenario and then pushes its ideas to the outermost limits, but it retains control right up to the very end.  It starts as a surreal comedy and moves seamlessly into a postmodern screwball sex farce: by the time the main characters start jockeying to get into Malkovich’s head and each others’ pants, we’ve already bought in to this crazy world and forgotten how insane it all is.  We start to enjoy watching the characters jockeying for position just as if we were watching a “normal” movie, and then the script suddenly slaps us in the face with one of its oddball inventions, like when we’re thrust into the chimp’s head as he flashes back to being captured in the African savanna.  Being John Malkovich is smart without being preachy, and daringly original without being alienating.  If your significant other won’t let you pick the Saturday night flick anymore after you’ve burned him or her one too many times by trying to get them to sit through Stalker or Funky Forest, then Being John Malkovich is a flick you can pull out to mend fences.  That alone makes it an essential tool to have on your DVD shelf.  Plus, it’s kind of funny.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“While its title might sound bizarre anywhere other than on a docu portrait of the actor, the work itself goes beyond odd, taking its unconventional outlandishness to hilarious, dizzying heights. Yet what makes it so fresh is the decision to treat even the story’s most surreal inventions in real, rather than fantastical terms…”–David Rooney, Variety (contemporaneous)

“The filmmakers are stoned on weirdness for its own sake…”–Stephen Farber, Movieline (contemporaneous)

“The movie handles [the Malkovich portal] not as a gimmick but as the opportunity for material that is somehow funny and serious, sad and satirical, weird and touching, all at once… stakes out a completely new place and colonizes it with limitless imagination.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

IMDB LINK: Being John Malkovich (1999)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Salon: Being Charlie Kaufman – Michael Sragow’s essay/interview with the screenwriter after Being John Malkovich‘s release

Being John Malkovich @ Being Charlie Kaufman – the Being John Malkovich page on the Kaufman fansite

Spike Jonze and the Art of the Ramble – Movieline piece about a New York Times profile on Jonze culls a couple of nice tidbits about Being John Malkovich

Drunk Dude throws can at Malkovich on Set – a YouTube clip of a purported snippet of the DVD commentary for the beer can scene; an interesting hoax (perpetrator unknown), since there’s no director’s commentary and the scene appears in Kaufman’s script exactly as it plays out onscreen.

What John Malkovich Sees When He Reads This Review – thanks to Ka-Ping Yee for creating the Malkovich Mediator

DVD INFO: The Universal Special Edition DVD (buy) features some of the oddest extras your likely to find, and we’re not just talking about the motormouthed woman hired to play an anonymous motorist on the New Jersey Turnpike who’s paranoid about a fellow driver because she prefers canned green beans to fresh ones.  There’s also an abruptly interrupted interview with Jonze, a featurette on the art of marionettes featuring interviews with student puppeteers on what they thought of the film, and a menu item with nothing there (it warns you there’s nothing there, but it’s still an irresistible visit).  You can also watch the “7 1/2 Floor Orientation” film complete and uninterrupted, as well as the film’s mock TV segment spotlighting Malkovich’s career.  On the more conventional end of the spectrum there’s a set of production stills and the theatrical trailer, but there are also three impossibly bizarre TV spots that just had to be created specifically for the DVD (one doesn’t even mention the film).  Each menu item is accompanied by a different piece from the soundtrack: you can hear the evocative end-credits track by the ever-weird Bjork by going to the language menu.  These oddities almost—but not quite—compensate for the lack of a commentary track (even a facetious one). Hopefully, they’re saving that tidbit for a Blu-ray edition.

UPDATE 5/18/2012: In May 2012 Being John Malkovich was added to the Criterion Collection (buy). The Criterion release includes a newly remastered print (obviously). Several of the special features were ported over from the Universal release, but new material includes selected scene commentaries by Michel Gondry, a behind-the-scenes mini-doc, and new interviews with director Spike Jonze and the man everyone wants to be, John Malkovich. A Blu-ray version (buy) with all the same features was released simultaneously.

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Folkwin.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d …”–Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard

DIRECTED BY: Michel Gondry

FEATURING: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson

PLOT: A shy introvert named Joel and a kooky gal named Clementine with ever-changing hair colors meet and fall in love.  After a fight Joel tries to reconcile, but discovers Clementine has availed herself of a strange and anachronistic mind-erasing technique to remove all memories of him; in a fit of pique and pain, he decides to undergo the same procedure.  But as Joel begins the erasure process, he realizes he doesn’t want to go through with it, and he travels through the landscapes of his memories to find and hold on to the rapidly vanishing Clementine.

BACKGROUND:

• Charlie Kaufman came up with the idea for this fascinating tale and co-wrote the script with the help of director Michel Gondry and obscure Parisian performance artist Pierre Bismuth.
• The title is taken from the classic Alexander Pope poem Eloisa to Abelard, which reflects a number of philosophical and emotional touchstones of the film.
• Before Jim Carrey expressed a desire to play Joel, the likeliest candidate for the part was Nicolas Cage (!)
• The scene where Mark Ruffalo scares Kirsten Dunst is completely genuine: director Gondry asked that before each take that Ruffalo hide in a different spot to really scare the pants off her!

INDELIBLE IMAGE: This bold and invigorating trip into the subconscious has a myriad of off-the-wall images that are sure to stick in your head. From faceless creatures to over-sized environments to entire train stations being drained of its inhabitants due to memory loss, there is a lot of weirdness going on here.  But as far as an indelible image, the one I pick is the simple scene in which Joel remembers when he and Clementine snuggle beneath an old ratty blanket and he consoles her after she recounts an intimate and revealing story about a doll she named after herself as a child.  As the memory seeps out of his head and Clementine’s body disappears, Joel crawls through the ratty blanket of his imagination begging to be able to hold on to this particular memory.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Any film birthed from the madcap imagination of Charlie

Original trailer for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Kaufman and surreal visualist Michel Gondry has at least a pretty good shot of being kind of different.  But this movie in particular, a film about memories literally being erased from people like they were organic hard drives, really takes Kaufman’s dry strangeness and Gondry’s unhinged wild-eyed wonderment and melds it to a delightful perfection that muses on life while simultaneously compelling us with images of collapsing landscapes and Jim Carrey bathing in a sink.

COMMENTS: Some would say that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a movie about
the heart, while others would say it’s about the mind, and still others would say it’s about the soul.  That so many people have such diverse opinions on it speaks volumes, especially when one considers the crux of the movie for a moment: Joel and Clementine are simply two lovers who have opted to forget about one another, albeit with their fair share of doubts left behind.  On the surface, it appears to be little more than a quirky romantic drama, and even with the fabulous imagery it still maintains its simple core of a love regretted.  What makes this different than something you would find in the indie film bargain bin is an intelligence and a philosophy behind it that not many other features can boast.

It is a film that speaks to the sad core of a relationship.  Joel and Clementine’s romance is dysfunctional in its optimism.  It is a love that is woefully mismatched and tries to work against it, and the film succeeds in showing the heartache of the divide between two very different people who care for each other.  Clementine is a punky extrovert, wearing her emotions on her sleeve with a loud mouth and wacky colored hair.  Joel is much more insular, opting to watch his carefree spirit from afar.  Their personalities don’t exactly compliment each other, which explains their later tensions and eventual dissolution.  Most films would gloss over the details of such a mismatch and assume that love conquers all, but the gulf between these two and how it weathers a love over time is a refreshingly realistic touch for a movie draped in the fantastique.

What a fascinating idea.  A concept like this, in the wrong hands, could have ended disastrously, but in the capable grasp of Gondry and wunderkind Charlie Kaufman, this film came out almost flawlessly.  You are transported to a world of dreamlike memories that fall away in the face of a procedure that begins to look more and more like a terrible mistake.  It’s as terrifying as it is tragic, and its inevitability bears down upon our hearts every second, even though we still secretly hope for a second chance between Joel and Clementine.  The world inside Joel’s mind is equally impressive as a visual spectacle.  The way the memories manifest themselves—be they half-remembered words and ideas, sketchy faces, childhood fears revisiting the adult manifestation of Joel, or endless loops of seemingly unimportant details—all are lovingly rendered in a style that is both technically impressive and emotionally stirring.

This sumptuous feast for the mind is bolstered by breakout performances by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.  While I never expected any less from real-deal actress Winslet, Carrey genuinely surprised me.  As Joel, he made me feel so deeply for him that it shook me to my core as an ol’ softie.  There is such a vulnerability there that I never saw before, never would have imagined before.  He changed my opinion of him forever with this role, and for the first time I can look at Jim Carrey with unbiased eyes as a seriously talented actor with a range that can be aptly described as phenomenal.  But let’s not forget that Kate deserves her due for being half of this curious relationship.  Clementine is a free-spirit who doesn’t like being told what to do, doesn’t like boundaries, and it hurts her when Joel seeks to reign her in.  There are a number of scenes here in which she showcases an emotional range that solidifies her as one of the greatest actresses of this decade, and even with badly-dyed blue hair I can take a woman like her seriously.

But the peripheral characters also take us aback with their complex lives.  Lacuna Inc., the shady company that erases people’s memories, has an incredibly strange staff that somehow pull off the illusion that it’s a well-run, totally professional business, when in reality it’s the medical equivalent of hiring someone to steal all the photos in your wallet.  Headed up by Dr. Wierzniak and his assistant Mary, Lacuna uses some strange technology to do their dirty work, sending out slacker techies to make house calls and erase people’s memories from the comfort of their own home.  One of the technicians even tries dating Clementine by using the memories takes from Joel as he is erasing them!  Seedy, but it’s not nearly as bad as the relationship between the doctor and his assistant, which makes for some compelling drama.  The climactic scene between those two will have you aching for these characters, basking in their tragic realities.

So in the end, whether Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is about the heart, the mind, or the soul, its expressive visuals and its candid storytelling weave an emotionally ecstatic film that will leave you fascinated and captivated.  It is an experience that you will want to hold onto in your memories for as long as you can.

366weirdmovies adds: Sunshine proposes a brilliantly simple “what if” scenario— “what if you could completely erase the memory of your ex-lover?”—that is a universal daydream of everyone who’s ever been on the “dumpee” side of a dumping. The movie gives an answer that rings emotionally true, and is at the same time shamelessly romantic, life-affirming, and melancholy. In a crucial way, it’s irrelevant whether Joel and Clementine get together and live happily ever after; the key triumph is when Joel decides he doesn’t want to forget, when he decides the temporary pain of their breakup shouldn’t be allowed to betray the beauty of their shared past, decides he’d prefer to stumble down the hard path to recovering from heartbreak than to take a shortcut that would wipe out something precious. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Synechdoche New York) is often accused of being overly intellectual, distant and tricky; this is his most emotionally authentic and sincere script, and it’s not a coincidence that it’s the one that’s fervently embraced by the widest audience. It’s an amazing and affecting movie, even if you’re not a fan of strange cinema.

As far as weird goes, I find it to be starter-level stuff, more speculative and offbeat than surreal. There is some delightfully resolved confusion resulting from playing around with the timeline, and Gondry’s set-pieces have a music-video type of oddness to them, but once the impossible premise is established the story plays out with a relentless narrative logic. Still, it’s within the weird genre, however tenuously, and it’s such a lovely and beloved movie that I’m afraid readers would hang me in effigy if I denied it it’s rightful place on the List of 366 Best Weird Movies of all time. It’s a great entry point into the deranged cinema of Kaufman and his bizarre cinema kin; starting from here, you can branch out into ever-weirder vistas.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the director always insists on an excess of surreality by pedantically realising visually every strange detail of Joel’s memory-angst… All very wacky and Dick Lester-ish, like a grad-school Beatles movie, and for about five or ten minutes it’s funny and exhilarating. But it’s over-extended, and tends to undermine the rigorous realism which made the idea funny.”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

“Filled with the writer’s trademark neurotic characters, grungy atmospherics, and downbeat emphasis on domestic discord, it’s a baroque and intermittently brilliant brain twister so convoluted that it inevitably deposits the viewer in an alternate universe.”–J. Hoberman, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

“In this season of abundance for amnesiac romances, Eternal Sunshine – with its laughs and its weirdness and its contemplation of some of the big issues regarding memory and identity – is the hands-down winner… a delightful little wormhole that takes us on a journey to another dimension of consciousness.”–Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE: Focus Features – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

IMDB LINK: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Lacuna Inc. – the fake website for the memory-erasing corporation of Eternal Sunshine that was part of the original marketing campaign for the movie

Roger Ebert’s Great Movies Essay – In-depth meditation by Roger Ebert as to what makes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind such a classic.

The Science of Memory Loss – Slate.com chimes in with an intriguing essay about the realities behind the Eternal Sunshine ”memory erasure” technique.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at Being Charlie Kaufman – A fansite devoted to screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Here you can find stills, fan art, audio, video, and even drafts of scripts from Eternal Sunshine.

Christian Review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – An… interesting take on the film from an interesting source!

DVD INFO: The original one-disc edition of this DVD (buy), which is incidentally the one I saw, isn’t incredibly flattering as far as the special features go, but I have seen much worse.  It comes with a Michel Gondry-Jim Carrey interview, which is playful but uneventful, some pretty good deleted and alternate scenes, a fake commercial for Lacuna Inc., and a terribly banal music video for a song The Polyphonic Spree lent to the film. The commentary is an acquired taste, but absolutely seminal if you like your commentary tracks. It’s performed by Kaufman and Gondry, and while it’s really quite informative, it sounds a bit like the David Lynch short The Cowboy and The Frenchman. Kaufman is very droll and American, Gondry is very giggly and French, so it makes for an interesting pairing in the recording booth when they’re both trying to relay their own experiences. Recently, a two-disc edition has emerged that blows the previous version out of the water (buy). It contains an “Anatomy of a Scene,” sit-downs with various cast members, some featurettes, and even a screenplay book! If you can, I would buy that edition, but for the filmgoer on a budget, the standard edition is more than adequate. Eternal Sunshine is also available on Blu-ray (buy) and as a rental on Amazon’s video on demand (rent).

DIRECTED BY: Charlie Kaufman

FEATURING: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener

PLOT: Caden is a community theater director in Schenectady, New York, whose marriage and health are crumbling.  When things seem their lowest—his wife abandons him, and he believes that he’s dying—he inexplicably receives a MacArthur Genius grant.  He uses the money to create a meticulous recreation of New York City inside a warehouse, filled with actors playing characters from his own life, including one playing Caden the director himself.

BACKGROUND:

• Synecdoche is the directorial debut of Charlie Kaufman, who has been the screenwriter behind most of Hollywood’s big-budget weird films in the past decade.  His scripting credits include Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).
• Kaufman began the script for Synecdoche as a horror film to be directed by frequent collaborator Spike Jonze.  Over two years the script evolved into its current tragicomedy form, and, as Jonze was busy with other projects, it was agreed that Kaufman would direct, with Jonze co-producing.
• Synecdoche, New York won the 2008 Independent Spirit Award for best first feature.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Synecdoche is a movie that weirds us out more through the concepts and dramatic situations than through the visuals, but there is a lovely image of a tattooed rose that physically sheds a real dead petal as its owner expires.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Charlie Kaufman.  More to the point, Charlie Kaufman unleashed; unlike Being John Malkovich or Adaptation, where weird and puzzling events are given a rational (if obscure) answer by the end, the weirdness of Synecdoche deliberately frustrates all attempts at a logical solution.  Hazel’s house, which burns and smokes for decades without being consumed, is shamelessly absurd.  The movie is an exploration of dream logic, a life journey that fractures time, space and coherence, where individual events do not add up piece by piece on a plot level, but resolve themselves on an emotional level.

Original trailer for Synecdoche, New York

COMMENTS: “There is a secret something at play under the surface, growing like an invisible virus of thought.”  This might sound like a soundbite from a pretentious review of Synecdoche, New York, but it’s actually a snippet of the soundtrack of a children’s cartoon that’s overheard in the early moments of the movie.  Long before Hazel moves into her burning house with its extremely motivated seller, little clues like this have been scattered throughout to tell us that Caden Cotard’s strange world is very far away indeed from ours.

There are so many tiny bizarre details spread throughout the movie that it demands a second and third viewing to catch most of them.  Most people will not notice the fact that, according to newspapers and dates on milk cartons, several months pass on that first day.  As the movie progresses, it becomes more and more undeniable that we’re trapped in a bewildering land indeed.  A four year old child prodigy writes a novel about a virulent anti-Semite (later turned into a feature film), and kills himself at five.  Caden is pressured into buying a self-help book written by his therapist, and before cracking it open he looks it up on the Internet to find that an animated icon of himself is already shilling it: “It will change my life!”  For no reason that’s ever explained, a stalker follows him everywhere for years on end, which later qualifies him to be cast in the role of Caden Cotard in the play put on by Caden Cotard.

A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which the part is used to represent the whole (or less commonly, the whole is used to represent a part).  An example is speaking of a “head” of cattle when we mean the entire cow, saying “all hands on deck” when we mean the entire crew (not just their hands), or using the term “the big screen” to represent the entire movie industry.  In a way, every serious work of dramatic art is an attempt at synecdoche, because every story intends to say something universal about some aspect of human experience and existence by using particular characters in a particular situation as an illustration.  “Macbeth” is about unchecked ambition, with the fatally ambitious Scot playing the part that represents the deadly whole.

Synecdoche is also pronounced almost exactly like “Schenectady,” the New York town where Caden lives at the beginning of the movie.  The synecdoche/Schenectady confusion/similarity doesn’t stand alone: a number of homonyms and sound-alike word pairs reverberate throughout the script.  When Caden wakes his sleepy wife to tell her he has blood in his stool, she thinks he’s talking about his work stool.  When a doctor refers him to an ophthalmologist, Caden mishears and thinks he’s being referred to a neurologist; then, when the ophthalmologist in turn refers him to a neurologist, he thinks he’s being sent to a urologist.  Caden suffers from sycosis, a skin disease that’s giving him unsightly facial boils, but he takes pains to explains to his uncomprehending four year old daughter that he’s not suffering from psychosis–although we in the audience may disagree.  Throughout the film, words constantly slip, failing to correctly convey the thing they’re supposed to refer to.

Caden’s great project, the simulacrum of the city of New York staged inside a giant warehouse, also inevitably fails to recreate the reality of what it intends to represent.  Seeking truth, determined to be completely accurate in his depiction of the city, he finds he is facing an insoluble problem.  The city he is trying to capture with total, unflinching realism contains a warehouse in which a director is trying to create a lifelike representation of New York City.  So, to be true to life, he must create another warehouse inside his warehouse.  And, there is also a director inside the warehouse, so he must cast an actor in that role; but now there is an actor playing the role of a director inside the warehouse, so he must find someone to play that part too.  Soon, there are doubles and triples of each character running around and warehouses nested inside warehouses, and it becomes obvious that it will be impossible to literally create the totally uncompromising and true to life project Caden seems to need to give his life meaning.

On this level, the theme of the movie resembles the 1946 Jorge Luis Borges short story “On Exactitude in Science,” in which royal cartographers can only make a totally accurate map of an empire by making it on a scale of one mile to one mile, so that the map ends up being exactly as large as the kingdom itself.  Writers have been exploring these ideas of recursion and infinite regress of thought and language–the concept that it’s impossible to express everything, because once we make our expression, we now must express that expression too, and so on to infinity–for years.  Kaufman is the first screenwriter to successfully explore this idea in movies.  The implication of the philosophical concept of recursion is that it’s impossible to truly know everything.  “Why is the sky blue?” Because the atmosphere scatters light at that precise wavelength.  “Why does the atmosphere scatter light?”  Following this line of thinking, we quickly realize that we cannot ever get to the bottom of things; our minds aren’t equipped and designed to comprehend ultimate reality.  For every answer we get, we can always ask one more “why?”  Trying to think our way to the ultimate truth, we find ourselves in a situation just like Caden with his infinite warehouses.

Caden tries to understand his bewildering and irrational world through his art, but he finds it’s impossible to do what he’s set out to do: to understand everything, to reflect everything.  His situation is absurd, but he persists.  As he obsessively sets his mind to the task, he grows from a spineless jellyfish who gets dumped on and abandoned by his first wife to someone who exudes confidence and control–at least on the set.  His personal life remains a sad mess.  As we watch him we grow to respect the fact that, although the task he’s set for himself is impossible, he presses on.  And his quest, although futile and halted by death, does actually give his life meaning, and gives him the strength to push forward through the disappointments of life.

And these disappointments are many; Kaufman is particularly cruel to Caden.  The director’s first wife, Adele, doesn’t respect his theatrical work and abandons him to become a famous artist herself.  He blows his chance at love with box office cutie Hazel. He ruins his relationship with a second wife by remaining obsessed with his former family and with his work.  Most painfully, his daughter Olive is taken from him, turned into a tattooist’s canvas by Adele’s lesbian lover, and lied to and told that her father has abandoned her.  Caden finds her, finally, as she’s dying.  In absurdly specific terms, she asks him to confess that he abandoned her for his homosexual lover so she can forgive him before she dies.  Reluctantly, he confesses to the lie; but she finds she still can’t forgive him, and expires.

The scene is completely impossible, from the improbability of Olive’s abduction to the headsets that magically translate her German speech to the dead rose petal that falls off her infected tattoo.  But the emotional reality of the situation is real, and gut-wrenching.  That’s the secret of Synecdoche.  Although we can’t make literal sense of the incidents that make up Caden’s life, by the end of the movie, we nonetheless know him, pity him, and admire him.  As one of the crew members observed on the DVD documentary, “it’s not about the way the plot adds up, but it’s about the way the feelings add up.”  Life may be bewildering, confusing, and frustrate our intellectual and artistic attempts to understand it; but the one thing we can do is recognize each other and our shared humanity.

Synechdoche the movie is so huge, and raises so many fascinating ideas, that it is impossible to do it justice in a short essay.  I have not mentioned the nearly flawless, mostly female, ensemble acting.  I haven’t mentioned Cotard’s Syndrome, or the hints in the movie that Caden may have committed suicide.  I have only hinted at the movie’s great sense of humor: the exchanges between Caden and his passively hostile host of specialist physicians are small masterpieces of sharp verbal comedy.  And I haven’t mentioned that this movie’s greatest flaw is that it’s fantastic sense of absurdist humor, which makes the first three-fourths of the movie so exhilarating despite the humiliations Caden suffers, deserts it in the dour and depressing final half hour as the director’s life runs out.  If I haven’t discussed these and other points in the detail they deserve, then such is the impossibility of describing a movie that’s so sprawling, jumbled, and intensely detailed.

Synecdoche, New York is an immense, over-ambitious work that attempts to be “about everything–dating, birth, death, life, family, all that.”  Such a project is obviously impossible and doomed to failure.  But, the film is also about the doomed impossibility of creating and immense, over-ambitious work of art about everything, about the regret that accompanies that futility, and about the necessity of continuing on regardless.  Caden’s play staged in the warehouse is an attempted synecdoche of his life, a part standing for the whole.  A single life, such as Caden’s, is also a synecdoche for all human life. And Synecdoche, New York, this confused and confusing thing, is a synecdoche of itself, and a synecdoche of us.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…just when you think it’s safe to go back to the movies, the plunger sucks up something from a clogged drain like the unspeakable, unpronounceable Synecdoche, New York, and you’re forced to take back every prematurely made prophecy about ‘the worst movie ever made.’ Because no matter how bad you think the worst movie ever made ever was, you have not seen Synecdoche, New York. It sinks to the ultimate bottom of the landfill, and the smell threatens to linger from here to infinity.”–Rex Reed, The New York Observer (contemporaneous)

“…a portrait of a creative mind in artistic and emotional crisis, painted as a vast mural that encompasses 30-plus years, slips from mundane reality into nightmare fantasy…No film with an ambition this large, and achievement this impressive, can be anything but exhilarating… a miracle movie.”–Richard Corliss, Time (contemporaneous)

“With Charlie Kaufman… one expects something weird and wonderful. So it will come as no surprise that ‘weird’ is an apt descriptor for Synecdoche, New York... But ‘wonderful?’ Not really. This is the kind of maddening, overstuffed, overambitious, self-indulgent motion picture that will divide critics and viewers (those few who see it)… less a movie than a series of disjointed meditations on art, death, and the connection between the two. Viewers who love to ascribe meaning to the cryptic will have a field day. To me, it seems more like weirdness for weirdness’ sake.”–James Beradinelli, Reelviews (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE: Synecdoche, New York – Sony Pictures.  Fans will want to download the press kit available here, which contains detailed bios of everyone involved in the film as well as ruminations on the intent behind the film from Kaufman and others.

IMDB LINK:  Synecdoche, New York (2008)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s New Film – montage of clips and soundbites from Hoffman, Kaufman and Catherine Keener on the film, produced by CBS television

Life Is a Dress Rehearsal: Charlie Kaufman’s Great Warehouse Experiment – Penetrating essay/review by Leo Robson of The London Times putting Synecdoche in the context of Kaufman’s entire body of work

Twitch – Synecdoche, New York – Interview with Charlie Kaufman – Interview with Kaufman centering around the dream logic of the film–although the interviewer, an expert on Jungian dream theory, spends more time elucidating his own interpretations of the film than Kaufman does supplying insights

DVD INFO:  The Sony Pictures DVD (buy) is almost reverential, packed with extras: a 19 minute documentary on the production; a 12 minute documentary starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman discussing Caden’s character; a 36 minute “bloggers roundtable” with five smart web-based reviewers discussing the movie; full-length versions of the three disturbing, surreal cartoons that are visible in the background of the movie; and footage of a 27 minute interview with Charlie Kaufman at a “The Script Factory” seminar where he discusses each of his scripts in chronological order, ending with Synecdoche (which is only very briefly discussed).  Also available on Blu-ray (buy).

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Zeldon.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Spike Jonze

FEATURING: Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Columbus

PLOT:  Adaptation tells two stories: in one, a “New Yorker” journalist (Meryl

Streep) becomes obsessed with the subject of her nonfiction book, a trashy but passionate collector of orchids (Chris Cooper); in the other, a depressed screenwriter (Nicolas Cage) struggles to adapt her book “The Orchid Thief” into a movie, while fending off his chipper and vapid twin brother (also played by Cage), himself an ersatz screenwriter.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  Adaptation is a metamovie, the filmed equivalent of metafiction (a literary style where the real subject of the work is not the ostensible plot, but the process of creating of the work itself).  In Adaptation, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) inserts a fictionalized version of himself into the script, writing and rewriting the story as the movie progresses.  Adaptation may appear unusual, and even weird to those who aren’t used to this kind of recursive style, but it’s a purely intellectual exercise about the creative process, and the mysteries presented in the movie have a purely logical explanation when considered in their literary context.

COMMENTS:  Adaptation sports perhaps the smartest script written in this young millennium, a story which twists and turns back upon itself with sly wit and playful intelligence.  (The screenplay was nominated by the Academy for “Best Adapted Screenplay”; maybe it would have won if it had been properly nominated in the “Best Original Screenplay” category).  In addition, the acting by the three principals—toothless and trashy Chris Cooper as the orchid thief, Meryl Streep as a jaded, intellectual journalist drained of passion, and Nick Cage as the twins, Charlie and Donald Kaufman—shows three veterans at the very peak of their games.   All three were nominated for Oscars, and Cooper won for “Best Supporting Actor.”   As good as Cooper was, it’s Cage’s magical performance as the writer paralyzed by artistic ambition and self-doubt, and also as his clueless doppelganger with a maddening Midas touch, that carries the film.  This is easily Cage’s best performance in an uneven career.

Despite the superlative script and performances, Adaptation falls just short of being an unqualified classic.  The problem is that the secondary plot—despite such welcome spectacles as Meryl Streep trying to imitate a dial tone while tripping balls—pales beside the more intriguing internal struggle of poor Charlie Kaufman.  When Streep and Cooper are on screen, we are always anxious to get back to Cage throwing barbs at himself.  Adaptation is geared towards a specialized audience—mainly writers, movie reviewers and other highly creative types—but will also appeal to fanatical film fans and industry insiders and would-be insiders who want to have a good wicked laugh at the cutthroat compromises required to bring a screenplay to life in Hollywood.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an occasionally maddening and sometimes brilliant motion picture that varies between being insightfully sharp and insufferably self-indulgent…  I can’t imagine Adaptation having much mainstream appeal, but, for those who look for something genuinely off-the-wall in a motion picture, this will unquestionably strike a nerve.”  -James Berardinelli, Reel Views