There are so many aspects of theatrical interest in Charlie Kaufman’s brilliant new film, Synechdoche, New York, it’s tempting to say it’s the most important film about the theatre ever made — well, since All About Eve, perhaps.

Hoffman plays a small town director — he’s first seen producing a revival of Death of a Salesman with an under-age Willy Loman — who wins a major award and decides to mount an epic of his own life in a huge warehouse.

Into this project he pours, or the film streams, the disintegration of his own personality, his marriage, his ambition and libido, in scenes that cross-fade with reality and exchange fictional characters for their real-life templates.

It’s a dizzying Pirandellian enterprise, breathtaking cinema with an absolute hold on its theatrical nature.

The choice for the Hoffman character is simple: do I want to be Trevor Nunn or Jerzy Grotowski? It’s a dilemma Rupert Goold must face every morning in the shaving mirror.

The film is brilliantly acted from top to bottom, but we must note especially the contributions of two British actresses, Samantha Morton and Emily Watson, who are now playing at the top of their game.

They are matched by two equally outstanding American actresses, Michelle Williams and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and watch out, too, for Dianne Wiest who somehow transmutes into a final version of the director, the final cut possibly. 

Although the movie has obvious echoes of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, it somehow transcends both of them in its ingeniously filmed discussion of how best to use the material of your own life in art.

And it’s held together by a magnificent, physically overwhelming performance by Hoffman that is magically breathed into the camera as though he wasn’t acting at all, the final beautiful irony.

Hoffman’s New York theatre colleague Stephen Adly Guirgis, whose plays have been seen at the Donmar and the Almeida, also pops up in the film, which made me wonder how those much trumpeted plans of the Ambassador Theatre Group to co-produce with them are coming along.

One thing’s for sure: ATG chief exec Howard Panter (sixty yesterday, the same day Julian Clary turned fifty and Ian McKellen, seventy: happy birthday, blossom dearies) couldn’t possibly make any mileage out of a stage version of Synechdoche.

The theatricality of the movie is entirely cinematic, though I dare say someone may be foolish enough to try; they were with Almodovar’s All About My Mother, and look what happened to that…polite reviews, but a real stinker.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 9:52 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.