Saturday, January 04, 2020

Synecdoche, New York (2008)

A theatre director disappointed with his personal life uses the money received as a result of his career success to reconstruct scenes from his life as part of a huge project.

A Charlie Kaufman movie difficult to watch due to its fatalistic and defeatist tone. Intelligent and very complex (Inception is nothing compared to this film), it lets the main character analyze his life and his mistakes and those of others through a clone of his own story where he allows so-called witnesses to reveal hidden truths unknown  even to himself. The finale finally shows him able to render the project (i.e. repair his life) in the correct way, aware that each of the individuals that populate the planet are the centre of their own disaster, only to take away the satisfaction of a dignified end from him.
The film is an ode to the drama and sadness of overthinking and letting things pass by, using the story of a man who manages to make unhappy at least four women and himself in very different ways (through incompatibility, lack of engagement/commitment, wrong choices and bad timing, abandonment, etc.). 
Only for fans of psychological analysis who are not too bothered by the possible depressive effect.

Screenplay/direction: Charlie Kaufman
Featuring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Katherine Keener, Tom Noonan, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest

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