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Synecdoche, New York:
This movie annoyed and irritated me, and I found myself waiting for it to end, and yet I was unexpectedly moved at its ending. The film raises a lot of questions and interestingly offers no answers at all, which is part of why the movie is not entertaining or engrossing in the ways we typically want our movies to be. It stars Philip Seymour Hoffman at his schlubiest, and several of our more mannered actresses. It's weird and dark in the way that Charlie Kaufman-written movies tend to be weird and dark, but at the same time its void of the humor or mania that you find in Being John Malkovitch or Adaptation. Rather than amuse, this movie brought to the surface a fear of death, an awareness of the relentlessness of time, and a sense -- almost a panic -- that I wasn't doing enough with this life and the time I have. This probably sounds sort of false or academic, but I mean these things literaly -- this is a movie that left me in a bit of a panic. It seems no accident at all that by the following evening I was suffering a fever and head congestion related to a sinus infection.
I can't think of another movie that raised, in the viewing of it, actual existential dread. (Sure, late period Al Pacino movies but those create more of a general concern for the future of mankind but not the personal reaction of Synedoche.) I can't really recap a plot here, because there sort of isn't one, just characters for whom time passes and aging occurs. Along the way, you're left to ponder how to forestall or resolve regret, the relationship of art to the idea of the "examined life," and -- perhaps foremost of all -- whether an "examined life" is a worthy thing. Actually, fairly similiar questions to those raised by "Hamlet" -- death, indecision, failure, regret, suicide, persistance -- but with some 21st century immediacy and some cartoons.
So Synecdoche, New York is a depressing and at times tedious movie, and I'm eager to see it a second time.
Synecdoche, New York:
This movie annoyed and irritated me, and I found myself waiting for it to end, and yet I was unexpectedly moved at its ending. The film raises a lot of questions and interestingly offers no answers at all, which is part of why the movie is not entertaining or engrossing in the ways we typically want our movies to be. It stars Philip Seymour Hoffman at his schlubiest, and several of our more mannered actresses. It's weird and dark in the way that Charlie Kaufman-written movies tend to be weird and dark, but at the same time its void of the humor or mania that you find in Being John Malkovitch or Adaptation. Rather than amuse, this movie brought to the surface a fear of death, an awareness of the relentlessness of time, and a sense -- almost a panic -- that I wasn't doing enough with this life and the time I have. This probably sounds sort of false or academic, but I mean these things literaly -- this is a movie that left me in a bit of a panic. It seems no accident at all that by the following evening I was suffering a fever and head congestion related to a sinus infection.
I can't think of another movie that raised, in the viewing of it, actual existential dread. (Sure, late period Al Pacino movies but those create more of a general concern for the future of mankind but not the personal reaction of Synedoche.) I can't really recap a plot here, because there sort of isn't one, just characters for whom time passes and aging occurs. Along the way, you're left to ponder how to forestall or resolve regret, the relationship of art to the idea of the "examined life," and -- perhaps foremost of all -- whether an "examined life" is a worthy thing. Actually, fairly similiar questions to those raised by "Hamlet" -- death, indecision, failure, regret, suicide, persistance -- but with some 21st century immediacy and some cartoons.
So Synecdoche, New York is a depressing and at times tedious movie, and I'm eager to see it a second time.
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