Synecdoche, New York

Roger Ebert's review of this film should spark discussion among folks who have an interest in art as food for our minds. I think it's the best film of 2008, and yet next to nobody saw it. Maybe we just aren't interested in film as an art form. Me, I'm planning to keep it at the top of my Netflix list.

Synecdoche, New York

/ / / November 5, 2008

Cast & Credits Caden Philip Seymour Hoffman Hazel Samantha Morton Claire Michelle Williams Adele Catherine Keener Tammy Emily Watson Ellen /Millicent Dianne Wiest Maria Jennifer Jason Leigh Madeleine Hope Davis Sony Pictures Classics presents a film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman. Running time: 124 minutes. Rated R (for language and some sexual content/nudity). Printer-friendly » E-mail this to a friend »

by Roger Ebert

I think you have to see Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" twice. I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film and that I had not mastered it. The second time because I needed to. The third time because I will want to. It will open to confused audiences and live indefinitely. A lot of people these days don't even go to a movie once. There are alternatives. It doesn't have to be the movies, but we must somehow dream. If we don't "go to the movies" in any form, our minds wither and sicken.

This is a film with the richness of great fiction. Like Suttree, the Cormac McCarthy novel I'm always mentioning, it's not that you have to return to understand it. It's that you have to return to realize how fine it really is. The surface may daunt you. The depths enfold you. The whole reveals itself, and then you may return to it like a talisman.

Wow, is that ever not a "money review." Why will people hurry along to what they expect to be trash, when they're afraid of a film they think may be good? The subject of "Synecdoche, New York" is nothing less than human life and how it works. Using a neurotic theater director from upstate New York, it encompasses every life and how it copes and fails. Think about it a little and, my god, it's about you. Whoever you are.

Here is how life is supposed to work. We come out of ourselves and unfold into the world. We try to realize our desires. We fold back into ourselves, and then we die. "Synecdoche, New York" follows a life that ages from about 40 to 80 on that scale. Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a theater director, with all of the hangups and self-pity, all the grandiosity and sniffles, all the arrogance and fear, typical of his job. In other words, he could be me. He could be you. The job, the name, the race, the gender, the environment, all change. The human remains pretty much the same.

Here is how it happens. We find something we want to do, if we are lucky, or something we need to do, if we are like most people. We use it as a way to obtain food, shelter, clothing, mates, comfort, a first folio of Shakespeare, model airplanes, American Girl dolls, a handful of rice, sex, solitude, a trip to Venice, Nikes, drinking water, plastic surgery, child care, dogs, medicine, education, cars, spiritual solace -- whatever we think we need. To do this, we enact the role we call "me," trying to brand ourselves as a person who can and should obtain these things.

In the process, we place the people in our lives into compartments and define how they should behave to our advantage. Because we cannot force them to follow our desires, we deal with projections of them created in our minds. But they will be contrary and have wills of their own. Eventually new projections of us are dealing with new projections of them. Sometimes versions of ourselves disagree. We succumb to temptation -- but, oh, father, what else was I gonna do? I feel like hell. I repent. I'll do it again.

Hold that trajectory in mind and let it interact with age, discouragement, greater wisdom and more uncertainty. You will understand what "Synecdoche, New York" is trying to say about the life of Caden Cotard and the lives in his lives. Charlie Kaufman is one of the few truly important writers to make screenplays his medium. David Mamet is another. That is not the same as a great writer (Faulkner, Pinter, Cocteau) who writes screenplays. Kaufman is writing in the upper reaches with Bergman. Now for the first time he directs.

It is obvious that he has only one subject, the mind, and only one plot, how the mind negotiates with reality, fantasy, hallucination, desire and dreams. "Being John Malkovich." "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." "Adaptation." "Human Nature." "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind." What else are they about? He is working in plain view. In one film, people go inside the head of John Malkovich. In another, a writer has a twin who does what he cannot do. In another, a game show host is, or thinks he is, an international spy. In "Human Nature," a man whose childhood was shaped by domineering parents trains white mice to sit down at a tiny table and always employ the right silverware. Is behavior learned or enforced?

"Synecdoche, New York" is not a film about the theater, although it looks like one. A theater director is an ideal character for representing the role Kaufman thinks we all play. The magnificent sets, which stack independent rooms on top of one another, are the compartments we assign to our life's enterprises. The actors are the people in roles we cast from our point of view. Some of them play doubles assigned to do what there's not world enough and time for. They have a way of acting independently, in violation of instructions. They try to control their own projections. Meanwhile, the source of all this activity grows older and tired, sick and despairing. Is this real or a dream? The world is but a stage, and we are mere actors upon it. It's all a play. The play is real.

This has not been a conventional review. There is no need to name the characters, name the actors, assign adjectives to their acting. Look at who is in this cast. You know what I think of them. This film must not have seemed strange to them. It's what they do all day, especially waiting around for the director to make up his mind.

What does the title mean? It means it's the title. Get over it.

Hollie Golightly: ESCAPE

Hollie Golightly: ESCAPE

Hey, we're blogging about theatre ideas, race and racism, & Mark Twain @ http://thankyounext.blogspot.com/

Come visit.

The Goal

"The goal is to balance a life that works with a life that counts."

Peter Block -- The Answer to How Is Yes

Adaptations?

Four of us, all theatre faculty members at Illinois State University in the late 1980s decided to collaborate on a production that would explore the use of mask and movement. We carved out rehearsal time outside our teaching and departmental production time. For weeks, usually working two or three nights a week, we improvised -- four of us, sometimes in pantomime, sometimes speaking, and sometimes on hands and knees grunting as animals.

After more than two months of improvisation and conversation about our explorations, we decided to create our project by adapting an existing play; in turn, we agreed to use Georg Buchner's unfinished manuscript for Woyzcek (ca.1830s). One of us would play the title character; the only woman in our group would play Woyzcek's wife; and the third actor, wearing masks, would play the several other characters. We would choose designers and technicians when we were clear about what we needed them to contribute. Eventually costume, scene, lighting, and sound designers joined the project by invitation of the four of us. A research grant from the University paid for materials. Nobody connected to the project was paid.

We titled our production in a way that made clear that it was, indeed, an adaptation: Scenes From the Death of Woyzcek. Working from two translations, we improvised dialogue, some in German, some in French, and some in English. In performance, our production played about seventy minutes. I've seen two productions that used most of Buchner's dialogue; they lasted about two and a half hours. A recent performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a terrific joint production from Vesturport Theater of Iceland in collaboration with the Reykjavik City Theater combined rock music, aerial and underwater events. It played about an hour and a half.

There's something about Buchner's Woyzcek that attracts theatre makers. And, it's my impression that adaptations have, for the most part, been more successful than the revivals that used the full text.

Now, let's loop back to the current Roundabout production of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler that Ben Brantley called "one of the worst revivals I ever, ever have seen." Would Brantley have been more tolerant if the production had been advertised as an adaptation? Or is it merely a failed production?

What are the essential differences between theatrical revivals and adaptations? Are there different aesthetics that apply to revivals versus adaptations? What are the differences? And, of course, is the topic even worth fussing over?

Any suggestions?

Shakespeare and Subsequent Performances

In criticizing the director of the Roundabout Theatre's revival of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, New York Times critic Ben Brantley calls the production "one of the worst revivals I have ever, ever seen." Brantley's a reviewer whom I admire; so, I'm imagining it's a really bad production. But my question and concern for this post is: what is so special about reviving a play that he limits his criticism to it's being one of the worst revivals?
What's special about revivals? Brantley doesn't say, but he inspires me to pursue the question: what are the special questions that should be raised in staging revivals -- that is, what's special about staging what director/comedian/physician/ and writer Jonathan Miller calls, Subsequent Performances?


"Shakespeare and Subsequent Performances:
Illinois State University's Foundation had been donated a neo-Norman Chateau that the community called, "the Castle," smack dab in the middle of Bloomington, and after five years of political effort, we gained permission to establish a Shakespeare festival on the rolling greensward behind the former home of an illustrious and wealthy family.

Having never run an outdoor, professionally oriented theatre devoted to Shakespeare, in October, 1977, I sought counsel from colleagues who'd done it successfully for several years. One, I engaged to meet with me for a day in New York City where he guided me through a hefty list of questions, "how do you . . .?" The only advice I rejected totally was my consultant/colleague's recommendation that we set the plays and stage them in costumes ranging from the 1560s (the reign of Elizabeth and the time of Shakespeare's birth), to the late 1660s.

Instead, having seen Shakespeare's plays set in London and in the U.S. in periods ranging from the Greeks' to contemporary dress, I determined that Illinois Shakespeare Festival directors and their production teams would have free rein to determine what setting would best support their interpretation of the text and their conceptualization of how that interpretation would best be realized.

Bloomington and Normal, Illinois, are surrounded by small towns that lacked the population numbers to support a summer Shakespeare festival, but Bloomington is the headquarters of State Farm Insurance whose employees, along with two local universities, Illinois Wesleyan and Illinois State, provided the festival a middleclass, educated and educable audience. The first season tested the audience's openness and flexibility: I'd hired the Chicago director Dennis Zacek, artistic director of Chicago's Victory Gardens Theatre, a non-profit that subsequently won the 2001 Tony Award for its artistic achievements under Dennis's leadership. Dennis announced to me that he intended to set Twelfth Night "in the twenty-first century," and quickly added, "but not Star Wars.

Dennis and his design team, notably the late Frank Vybiral as costume designer, created an audience-pleasing, delightfully humorous production in which every actor was dressed in obviously synthetic fabrics, many of them cut in the style of "doublet and hose" a la Elizabethan England. Andrew Agucheek's "flaxen beard" was cut and pasted from yellow plastic broom. Malvolio's wig was made from purple dyed ping pong balls. And so it went. The production was, indeed, futuristic.

I'd forecast to the local press that the festival would be setting the plays in costumes other than those of Shakespeare's day, but none chose to include in their articles my systematic rationale for why it was appropriate to take what many in the audience might object to as inappropriate artistic license.

In the days after we opened, to my pleasure and surprise, I received only two or three written objections. To each critic, I responded with a rationale that I'll attempt to paraphrase:
"From the available historical evidence, we must guess that Shakespeare's plays were originally staged in the clothing of his day, the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth centuries (1590s to 1616 or so). There are extant drawings that show characters wearing the clothes of the day, apparently without regard for what period the play is set in -- from the Greeks and the Romans to Shakespeare's day. Shakespeare seems to have been concerned with his plays' theatrical vitality and not with historical accuracy; for example, in Julius Caesar he has a line that refers to a clock striking when, in fact, clocks hadn't yet been invented.

Therefore, we can argue that a historically accurate production of a Shakespeare play would be staged today in our modern dress, in clothes appropriate to the character's economic, professional, and social status. And, to add to the confusion about setting the plays, we must acknowledge that they were produced in the daytime without the support of electric lights and amplified sound.

To put limits on the time in which a Shakespearean play is set is to impose restrictions that we must assume would never have occurred to him and his contemporaries. The concept of historical accuracy, in the way we think of it, seems to me to grow out of antiquarian interests developed in mid-nineteenth century London. I don't want to do that to my colleagues."

Having raised and addressed one topic associated with reviving plays -- in this case, plays by the author, William Shakespeare, whose plays are most frequently revived -- what other questions should we pose regarding the revival of plays? For example, is there a difference between reviving plays from foreign countries? From other periods in history?

Let's see if we can collect some questions and answers here at this site.

subsequent performances: how to judge revivals and adaptations?

If you're a reader of NY Times theater reviews, you may know that Ben Brantley proclaimed Roundabout Theatre Company's staging of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, "one of the worst revivals I have ever, ever seen." The Times headlined the review, "Hedda's Terrible, Horrible, No-Good Very Bad Day."

Having also read the NY Post's and the NY Daily News's reviews, I decided that when I return to NYC in March, if this Hedda's still running, I'll attend it only if I'm hungering for a theatrical train wreck, and, if I've scored a really cheap ticket.

The purpose of my post, though, is not to laugh over the Roundabout's grave, giggling over a failed revival; rather, I want to provoke some discussion of the standards we might demand of a production that revives a "great" text, and the expectations we might apply to ourselves, to critics and to reviewers -- each of us who's seeking to talk about a theatrical revival, whether it be a revival of a recent play or one that is hundreds or thousands of years old.

Check in tomorrow, and I'll begin exploring questions I've wrestled with while serving for thirteen years as artistic director of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, along with questions I've considered over more than forty years of seeing professional and amateur, American and foreign revivals of "classics," sometimes as a paying audience member, sometimes as an academic colleague, and occasionally as a critic.

If you've never read it, look up a copy of the British director/author/comedian/physician Jonathan Miller's 1986 book, Subsequent Performances. I've read his opinions, seen revivals he's directed, attended his lectures, and considered his writings. He's really smart and really talented.

unlearning racism -- language and action

When we were on the topic of unlearning racism, Scott commented that the visibility of a black president on "24" and Tiger Woods and his visibility were important in changing the ways white people began seeing black people. And he's right. A couple of our former Illinois State students, Suzzanne Douglass and Robert Townsend changed perceptions with a family-oriented series called, "The Parent 'Hood."

I'm entering this post as "new" because I want to take the discussilon in a different direction:

The situation now is that you & I, whatever our ethnicities, and wherever we get our corn pone, must not say anything that might be interpreted as conveying racial/ethnic prejudice. And that's a good thing. In my growing up years, 1940s, all the racial slur/ethnic terms were thrown around casually. There's no doubt that it created and perpetuated a pervasive intellectual and emotional infection.

Of course, the downside is that now we can't raise some questions without running social/political risks. For example, I believe we should be punishing businesses that hire undocumented workers (aka: illegal workers). There's no doubt that these employers are driving down wages for our most unfortunate American citizens, especially for under-educated African Americans -- the people who in today's America are the last hired and the first fired.

Yet, when I've asserted that the employers should be seen doing a "perp walk" for their hiring practices, I've been responded to as prejudiced against immigrants. My prejudice is not against immigrants; it is against those who are unwilling to do the government check (available free of charge) to determine if a job candidate's Social Security number indeed corresponds to the person's name. This week, we have a candidate for the Obama cabinet who's following in the ignoble historic tracks of Bush/Bernie Kerik and Clinton with Wood & Baird -- cabinet candidates who had to confess that they'd cut back on their household expenses by hiring folks who didn't have their papers in order -- undocumented persons.

I'd love to see us require "affirmative action" searches that require employers to advertise jobs and affirm there are no legal workers available before breaking the law by hiring the undocumented.

Lest a reader assume I'm against legalization of the undocumented: I favor a legalization process like that proposed by President Bush and the Congress last year; I'd merely like there to be teeth in the hiring laws BEFORE the legalization proceeds. For decades we Americans essentially invited about 15 million folks to come into the U.S. and work, regardless of their immigration status. It would be wrong to deport those informally invited workers and their families. However, before we begin to legalize the millions of informally invited persons, we must assure all Americans that we are enforcing our existing employment and immigration laws. Enforcement first. Legalization next, and with no need for immigrants who are already here, at our invitation, to exit and re-enter the country.