- Oh yay, a play within a play within a play within a play within a play within a play… you get the idea.
- Are people really so narcissistic in real life that filmmakers think people are actually like this? I feel this is depressing commentary on our society. I know no one likes to see completely selfless characters on screen because they’re boring and pious and whatever else, but I can’t handle this much self-absorption and I feel like the number of movies I’m finding it in keeps increasing.
- I feel like this movie was pretty straightforward in that while Caden’s (Philip Seymour Hoffman) personal reality may have initially coincided with actual reality, it became quite clear how his grasp of reality diminished and his own personal reality was entirely made up of a self-perpetuating cycle of despair, decrepitude, and desolation. I mean, by the end of it it’s clearly all in his head and he’s constructed an incredibly complex way of working through all the problems in his life.
- I thought it was a bit annoyingly ironic that real!Caden made a directorial note that play!Caden was being too expository with his dialogue, only to have Diane Wiest later come out and neatly summarise real!Caden’s life and issues because that too was too expository. It was quite clear what was happening and I didn’t feel she needed to tell us. It was the same as when someone started talking about how the characters turn into one another, that we’re actually all one, etc. and then Audrey and I just started quoting from Wedding Crashers: “That we’re all one. That separateness is an illusion, and that I’m one with everyone – with the Prime Minister of England, and my cousin Harry, you and me, the fat kid from ‘What’s Happening,’ the Olsen twins, Natalie Portman, the guy who wrote ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ Nat King Cole, Carrot Top, Jay-Z, Weird Al Yankovic, Harry Potter, if he existed, the whore on the street corner, your mother. We’re all one. “
- And in case there was any further doubt as to the realism of this movie, no arts grant would ever be issued in an amount that would allow you to fund such a cast-heavy play for several decades. Clearly that is the height of unrealism.
- Jennifer Jason Leigh randomly speaking with a German accent once her character got to Germany was pretty hysterical.
- I wrote a story in high school that used far too many bad adjectives to describe certain smells and my teacher wrote “too much olfactory” in the margins. I feel like this movie does the same thing when it comes to all of Caden’s various health ailments because seeing pustules, sores, poop, and god knows what else just makes me ill rather than helping instill a sense of really vibrant, visceral realism. The gum surgery scene was probably the pinnacle.
- Despite how it might sound, I didn’t actually dislike this movie. It just smacked a little too hard of “edgy” high school drama club in places and reminded me why I don’t really like theatre as an art form.
- It’s pronounced si-NEK-duh-kee, in case anyone was wondering.
Synecdoche, New York
This is why I have difficulty enjoying the theatre.
IMDB Plot Synopsis A theater director struggles with his work, and the women in his life, as he attempts to create a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse as part of his new play.