I’ve been waiting months to see “Synecdoche, New York”. OK, two months since I saw the trailer. That’s still multiple months.
I remember how I felt when I saw “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (and maybe you do, too) – that love was painful and clumsy and impossible and hopeful.
“Synecdoche, New York” makes me feel almost the same way, only about life, and living.
All us poor dumb blind people… What the fuck are we trying to pull? Who are we trying to kid?
We wait for someone to notice us, and we flinch when we’re forced to notice others. We hide from everyone else, or we glitz ourselves up because we’re afraid to blend in.
I cried throughout the movie. I cried when just walking around on the sunny cold streets of my hometown afterward. Boys in their twenties jumping up to try to touch the ceiling in the glass tunnel over SW Fourth. Fashion mom and her flashy daughter, each clutching their logo-emblazoned shopping bags full of stuff. Chubby woman in dirty clothes, balled up on the sidewalk begging for coins. Old men in golf shirts and slacks harrumphing at the traffic.
All y’all… all y’all are the same person, if Kaufman’s movie is to be believed. And Kaufman writes, and Philip Seymour Hoffman tells it without varnish, and it feels honest like a knife in your chest.
You can look elsewhere for a synopsis of the movie. I need to see it many more times.
If art is whatever makes you feel something, then this movie is art to me.