Writing about a movie, or music, or even meaningless pop culture... it's in my nature to want to sound eloquent, intelligent, or at least like I have a clue what the fuck I'm talking about.
But tonight I endured a movie that has left me an emotional wreck, and without any of the necessary words. Or the right words, or maybe not even the words that make a lick of sense. Which would be appropriate, given the movie that I watched tonight:
Synecdoche, New York
Synec-what?! Who the hell has even heard of this movie. Well, it's the directorial debut of Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter behind Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I have long had a hate him/love him relationship with Kaufman. "Malcovich" was an amusing trifle, a bit self-conscious and smug, while Adaptation was one of the most navel-gazing, self-indulgent movies ever that made me want to punch Meryl Streep. How often do you want to punch Meryl Streep? That said, I adored Eternal Sunshine.
And in a lot of ways, this movie features similar themes of both those films I loved and hated, exploring the artistic process and the search for meaning within the context of one person's life. It's almost like Kaufman was teasing the edges of those themes in those latter two films, but Synecdoche, New York is so astonishingly raw, painful, achingly sad, and elegiac that it just might be one of the most important movies ever made. Hyperbole, yeah, but… god, I’m just at a total loss right now. I warned that I wouldn't sound coherent.
It was so gut-wrenching to watch, and so utterly illogical and random and all over the place and dream-like and non-narrative, that it was just an absolute mess, and that’s part of the point. It’s intentionally messy, and ugly and obtuse. It is self-obsessed, and universal-looking with gigantic open arms all at the same time. Years pass, and people describe them as weeks. Characters develop physical ailments, which then disappear. Some characters age, becoming old, while others don’t. So much of it makes no logical sense – and for people not willing to go along on the journey, it will be truly infuriating to the point of walking out – but the entire thing is about digging deep into our individual pain, which is really a universal pain, and trying to find truth, and meaning, and connection. And not finding it. And yet somehow finding it too.
It’s so dreamlike that it’s not a tear-jerker as it unfolds, but I found tears pouring down my face during the final credits. After it all ended. Because I wasn’t crying for the movie, but I was crying for what the movie said about me, about everyone else, about life. It made me want to crawl under a bed and sob for the next two weeks.
There is craft, there is art, and then there’s something that’s almost beyond art. I kind of feel like I saw that tonight. Something that gets beyond image, and sound, and texture, and story, and meaning, and gets to a place that people can’t easily get to. And I bet that 7 out of 10 people who see that movie will hate it (maybe even 8 of 10)… but something really remarkable and depressing and transcendent took place on that screen… and I hated it, and loved it, and it’s something that’ll stay with me for a long time to come.
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