Synecdoche, New York (5 stars)
Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman. With Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Tom Noonan, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Lee, and Dianne Wiest. (R)
If you're going to see Synecdoche, New York, you might want to think about bringing a notebook. The cinematic equivalent of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, this breathtaking film is littered with the kind of details that reward close viewing, and so richly layered in its structure that it continues to give up its secrets long after the lights go up.
For fans of writer/director Charlie Kaufman, none of this will come as a surprise. Best known as the writer of films like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, his mind-bending work has always been the sort that raises as many questions as it answers, the kind that gives rise to all-night conversations in coffee shops. Toying with reality without resorting to the supernatural, Kaufman's wonderlands are like that old artist's trick: a painting of a painter painting a painting of a painter painting a painting.
In Synecdoche, Philip Seymour Hoffman is Caden Cotard, a theater director who lives in Schenectady, N.Y. with his artist wife Adele (Catherine Keener) and their little girl, Olive. (The title rhymes with the town, in case you're wondering how to pronounce it.) Obsessed with his own mortality, Caden pores over the obituaries, where he notes the death of playwright Harold Pinter. Pinter's still alive, but it's a telling detail in a film that will come to focus so much on memory; the author of a series of work sometimes called "the memory plays," Pinter also starred in a recent production of Samuel Beckett's history-obsessed Krapp's Last Tape.
In short succession, Adele leaves and Caden wins a MacArthur award—the "genius grant"—that gives him the financial means to mount an enormous work of theater inside an empty Manhattan warehouse. Tired of restaging the work of others, he decides to create a wholly original piece, something that will live on long after he's gone. Reflecting on the countless relationships that make up a life, he realizes that "none of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due."
The play—if you can call something so enormous a play—takes over his life; determined to create something as genuine as possible, the details Caden calls for pile up until his set builders have recreated a section of Manhattan inside the warehouse, and the play evolves in step with the daily developments in his life. At one point, an actor wonders when the audience will arrive. "It's been 17 years," he says. A 17-year rehearsal should be a good clue that there's something more going on here.
Another clue comes when Sammy (Tom Noonan) arrives at the casting call for the role of Caden. If he looks familiar, it may be because he's been lurking in the background of many of the film's early scenes. When Caden goes to get the mail, Sammy is across the street. When he walks down the street with Olive, Sammy is slumped in a doorway. "I've been following you for 20 years," he tells Caden. "Hire me and see who you really are." So Sammy becomes Caden, and another actor is hired to play Sammy, furthering the hall-of-mirrors feel of the production.
As the lines between Caden's life and work begin to blur, his relationships—first with secretary Hazel (Samantha Morton) and later with actress Claire (Michelle Williams)—are both fodder for the work and destroyed by it. Morton is especially good here as the central woman in Caden's story, crafting a memorable performance that spans decades of aging.
The fact that Hazel lives in a house that's perpetually aflame is just another of Kaufman's breadcrumbs, like the fact that Caden shares his last name with a syndrome whose sufferers believe themselves to be dead. With his frequent allusions to double meaning (homonyms play a big role in the story), his fractured sense of time, and his hints of mortality, Kaufman crafts a jigsaw puzzle of a film. One of its chief joys is the fact that there are so many ways to put it together. In that way, it becomes art in a way that few films do, being less a story well told than a catalyst for thought.
Synecdoche, New York is in many ways the quietest of the films Kaufman has been involved with, less head-spinning than Eternal Sunshine or Malkovich. While it's not as immediately accessible as those two films were, it's a richer story, one that relies less on a central conceit than the simple fact that any life is an amazing story if you look at it closely enough. See it. Then see it again.
Nothing Like the Holidays (3 stars)
Directed by Alfredo De Villa. Written by Alison Swan and Rick Najera. With Alfred Molina, Elizabeth Pe?a, Freddy Rodriguez, Luis Guzm?n, Jay Hernandez, John Leguizamo, Debra Messing, and Melonie Diaz. (PG-13)
Four Christmases (2 stars)
Directed by Seth Gordon. Written by Matt Allen, Caleb Wilson, Jon Lucas, and Scott Moore. With Vince Vaughn, Reese Witherspoon, Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Jon Voight, Jon Favreau, Mary Steenburgen, and Kristin Chenoweth. (PG-13)
There's been a lot of talk in the press about Nothing Like The Holidays. Mostly it's been about the perception that the film is a Latino entry in the Christmas movie genre and, while that's more or less true, it doesn't really set it apart from most other Christmas movies in any significant way. A quick comparison with Four Christmases shows that bland, predictable holiday movies can cross any racial divide.
In Nothing Like The Holidays, a far-flung Puerto Rican clan returns to the Rodriguez home in the Humboldt Park section of Chicago, where family father Edy runs a popular neighborhood bodega. Son Jesse is returning from a tour in Iraq, daughter Roxanna from a short-circuited career as an actress in L.A. Flying in from New York is Mauricio (John Leguizamo), a successful lawyer whose non-Latina wife Sarah (Debra Messing) is a source of frustration to Anna, who wants her to start producing grandchildren.
Their extended family includes crass cousin Johnny (Luis Guzm?n, who gets to have most of the fun) and family friend Ozzy, who has nursed a crush on Roxanna for years. Most of his meaningful looks, however, are exchanged with the paroled gang member who murdered his brother. If the filmmakers want to move beyond stereotype—Leguizamo, in an interview on Fresh Air, lamented that when he got into acting, "Everything that was offered to me was killer, gangbanger"—pasting in this tired subplot about a killer and gangbanger isn't the way to do it.
Maybe they ran out of ideas after coming up with all the other subplots; every character seems to have a life-changing drama happening on the sidelines. Mauricio and Sarah are at odds over starting a family; Roxanna is waiting to hear if she's landed an important role; and Jesse—well, it all gets tiring to sort through, but he's got two or three subplots all to himself.
Somewhere in all that is the central story: at Christmas dinner, Anna announces her plan to divorce Edy, a bomb that throws the family into disarray. Children take sides, argue and make up, and argue again. Anna suspects Edy of infidelity, and while he is keeping something from her, it's not what she thinks. When the truth comes out, it seems unbelievable that he would have risked his family's happiness for his secret.
Yet for all its tired tropes and familiar scenarios, there's a warmth to this family comedy that keeps it afloat. One scene in particular strikes home, when the entire clan decamps to a local bar after Anna's bombshell. As everyone laughs at Mauricio's hopelessly outdated dance moves, their shared sense of family history has the soft glow of a yuletide fire.
Four Christmases, on the other hand, would have done better to dispense with the good will toward men. Starring Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon as Brad and Kate, a materialistic couple who skip out on their families every Christmas, it starts as a fairly sharp-edged comedy and immediately begins losing steam as it transforms into a treacly, timid, throwaway thing.
After their flight to Fiji is canceled, the couple is busted when they appear on the nightly news. Stuck Stateside, they're forced to visit their four families—in a modern touch, both are children of divorce—who, despite living within driving distance, have apparently never met their children's significant other. What follows sticks to the usual holiday film template (though it would be refreshing to find an exception); lessons will be learned, lives will be brightened, and there will be hugging.
The promise of this film was that the presence of Vince Vaughn heralded a certain sort of comedy; the actor is a natural at the bawdy, R-rated wit that marked films like Old School and Anchorman, but here it's as if he's been neutered. Vaughn has always had a soft side—it's what makes even his most tasteless lines funny instead of offensive—but, for too much of this film, that's all he has. It's like a watered-down cocktail: too much mixer and not enough bite.
The worst part of it all is seeing such a great cast wasted. What other holiday film is likely to pull together Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek and Jon Voight? With Witherspoon, that's four Oscar winners, but only Duvall is really given a chance to shine. Tellingly, it's in the scenes featuring Brad's unsophisticated family, and the veteran actor is hilarious as the cantankerous father of a pair of cage wrestlers. Four Christmases could have used much, much more of that kind of humor.
A reminder of just what's missing from Four Christmases comes early. The airport ticket agent is played by Peter Billingsley; if you don't recognize the name, you'll likely recall the actor. He played Ralphie "you'll shoot your eye out" Parker in A Christmas Story—possibly the finest holiday film of all time. My advice? Save the eight bucks you'd spend at the theater and rent that film instead.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
