The theater director, in a creative crisis, tries to deal with his life and the women around him. Finally, thinking that it is not worth wasting his life, he decides to stage an “important and sincere play,” for this purpose erecting a real live model of New York in an abandoned warehouse. He goes through the throes of love and suffers from incomprehensible illnesses…

4k movies reviews
The extravagant Charlie Kaufman is now fifty. At that age, everyone probably thinks about death; Kaufman, as is his habit, thinks for five. It’s no coincidence that his directorial debut, “Synecdoche, New York,” is soaked with cynicism and a kind of suffocating sense of hopelessness that it explores similar themes – old age, decrepitude, decay, destruction.

The film’s protagonist, Kaden Kotar (Hoffman), a talented theatrical playwright by profession and a lonely balding bespectacled man by life, puts on a grand spectacle on the scale of New York City in a kind of shaky world of the manifested present. While behind the director is preparing (which, by the way, will take a lifetime), desperately rampaging hundreds of understudies and doubles, the life of a genius goes down the drain – his wife runs away, the little girl gets on a poster of a glossy magazine with the title “the most tattooed girl in the world,” a date with a pretty redheaded ticket seller ends under very awkward circumstances, and the doctors diagnose the advanced stage of almost all diseases.

Amazingly, it turns out this way: the most justified and promising film debut in years is suddenly the most embarrassing film of our day. Suddenly – because expectations were too high, it seemed, if not the screenwriter of “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation”, then who else would achieve in directing new higher and unattainable results. Awkward – because “Synecdoche” gets off to a pretty brisk start, but by the middle it turns into a stream of some meaningless bits of mise-en-scene. It would probably be unfair to others if a brilliant screenwriter also ended up being an outstanding director. You can see that Kaufman is not a very good director: he shoots with a shaggy hand, gets lost in the rhythm, works with actors on the principle of plasticine (Emily Watson here makes up like Samantha Morton, fantastic!), and mounts the film in the same way a fifth grader cuts sausage, big juicy slices. He has some beautiful images in stock, like a permanently burning house or a self-written diary, but what’s the point of them if they don’t symbolize anything so special?

Now of course it’s clear that a strong counterbalance was essential to Kaufman’s madness, whether it was the spurry infantilism of Spike Jonze or the childish, naïve handiwork of Gondry’s Frenchman. Otherwise, all the props go to hell, fuses burn. The previous brilliant Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for all its outlandish plot, broken structure and backwards spin, was still the simplest and most straightforward film in the world – about how we are all, no matter how memory is erased, but destined to fall in love. Well, yes, perhaps “Synecdoche” can be interpreted in different ways: it is a movie about death and loneliness, about control and helplessness before it at the same time; about how gradually everything dies and the author along with the imperishable work. Or rather, even how any genius at heart wants to be a simple janitor. It doesn’t matter, though; is it even worth going through all this emotional torture with those who don’t appreciate anything? Although Kaufman is certainly right about something: at 20 we run after love and believe in miracles, and at 50 we are as sick and tired of life as a given, like an alarm clock, like black morning coffee with a dead sandwich.

Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (51.7 Mb/s)
Resolution: 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1

Audio
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 16-bit)
English: Dolby Digital 5.1

Subtitles
English, English SDH