30 Nov Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Death of a Playwright

I am thrilled by this film: all the wonderful narrative devices that I find delicious and engaging, and this time turned to have an effect on the viewer that is not to be lost lightly. He’s wonderful.

But I’m amazed at the writers who seem to have missed the significant structural arc. Without this shape, it is merely a tragedy with an interesting, introspective dialog, annotated by enabled poetic images (like the daughter’s death from sick tattoos). Without this shape, its not unlike a “Love Liza” mapped into “State and Main,” which was a rather easy to read mapping of the “state” of the play into the main of life.

Without this shape, you loses all the hope, all the rooting in life. You lose, I believe, everything that makes this uniquely useful as a scaffold for a whole new imagination. Without this one thing, you loose the layering all the way down into the soul of the writer, because the layering stops at the screen.

The thing I am talking about is “Death of a Salesman.”

If you were Kaufman, indeed any American screenwriter today, one of your touchstones has to be this play. Its important because it opens a new dimension on the internal dialog made visible outside the page. It introduces us to a whole new vocabulary of writing by a writer imposed on an ordinary life in such a way that the writer’s life is visible, surfing on the ordinary waves of waking and sleeping.

We are presented with a director, Hoffman, staging an unusual “Death of a Salesman.” He inserts himself in the thing, and the thing (and his body) become the (I should emphasise the singular) synecdoche of the world. Its a matter of his life and entire world being written and directed by himself, constrained by the shape of Lohman. If you step through the play, and layer folded imagination on it (with presumably more skill on the art and music design than Kaufman) you will have this.

It makes it matter that it is his first film as director. Also that it is perhaps Hofman’s twentieth film in a folded role made large enough by Kaufman as Arthur Miller. Moreover that he compresses the last two acts into a suspended death, one of dense concentration of vitality.

The cloud of women that he writes in to surround him is the thing that stellates this layered sky. Its built on a redhead of course, the one who serves as a gateway to his world.

Here is one flatting of the plot: A theatre director is staging a novel version of “Salesman,” working out minute novelties while he enters the play with his life in a way that the entry is explicit. His own life at 31 is characterised by “why”so he builds a play city around the apartment of his wife (numbered 31Y) who he imagines has left him. “Imagines” here is not separate from life, nor the visceral truth of the play. His wife is a similar soul, creating images of her life in a way (extreme miniatures) that requires an engagement of the viewer similar to what this film requires. There’s a marriage counsellor who has written books that are conflated with the play(s).

It is a fantastic construction, “fantastic” in both senses. Its as highly structured as “Irreversible,” and as literate, as layered as “Vanya on 42nd st,” as touching as, say a Tarkovsky. This matters. I don’t know yet whether it is among the best two films of 2008.

Posted in 2008

Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

IMDB