December 6, 2010

• Synecdoche, New York

  I’m not going to pretend I fully understood this movie. I’m not even going to claim I understand half of it. So much didn’t make sense to me, and I was lost during much of it.

  But some of it, I can comprehend. This movie was written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, who also did Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (a superb film). It’s about a man who directs plays, and has a very turbulent personal life. He receives a grant to do a play and buys a huge warehouse in New York. He then spends 50 years of his life writing this play and having people rehearse it. But it’s never performed. It never reaches the point of being finished and being performed for an audience. For 50 years, he has people performing this play. And this play, is his life. Scenes from his life. Everything that happens to him, he writes into the script.

  Could you imagine, becoming so engrossed in this, that all you do is write the scenes of your life to be rehearsed by actors but never performed? The warehouse is designed as a huge set of all the places he’s been. Could you imagine how sad that would be? So he has an actor that plays him in the play. Then, there’s an actor to play the actor that’s playing him….because the actors become a part of his life…so he has to have actors who play the actors. The dynamic and set up for this is fantastic… genius.

  I still don’t understand so much of it. For instance, one of the characters, Hazel, she buys a house that is constantly on fire. The house… is always on fire. But it never burns to the ground. She lives there for years and years. At an old age, she dies of smoke inhalation. I do not understand the house that is always on fire but never burns. What does that mean? (no, not double rainbow)

  I wish I could watch it again, but I wanna put it in the mail tomorrow so I can get the next movie on my list.

  • 11:26 pm
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