Synecdoche, New York and Shakespeare

Shakespeare would love Synecdoche, New York. He wrote about the kind of big issues that Charlie Kaufman has been grappling with in his latest movie - finding meaning in a meaningless universe, the desire against all odds to be the author of our life, how art can never deliver the real thing, Time's bewildering effect on experience and memory, and... I could go on.

The film centres on a theatre director, Caden Cotard, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who builds a replica of New York City inside a giant warehouse. He wants to direct his own life, and imagines that by creating this artifice, God-like, he can direct life itself.

This reminds me of Shakespeare's artist-magician, Prospero in The Tempest who came to realise that art can never be a substitute for life.

The movie's title reflects the major themes of art and truth. 'Synecdoche' is a figure of speech in which a part is substituted for the whole or the whole for a part.

Caden's replica of New York City re-presents the real New York City - a part for the whole, but not even a real part of the whole. The 'synecdoche' here shows art as a doubly inadequate substitution for life. Caden's imitation may be life-sized, but it's not life, only a constructed artifice, a mere simulacrum of a real thing.

Kaufman's film has sent me back to the first book I wrote about Shakespeare that looked at the dramatist's obsession with exposing art's sterility. He's always questioning whether art can ever do more than offer artifice. Imitate life, and it becomes lifeless. How can the artist or writer accommodate the flesh-and-bloodness of human existence, organic process, mutability and time?

Kaufman seems to me to share some of Shakespeare's preoccupations with the relationships between art and truth, identity and memory, loss and desire. And there's something else about Synecdoche, New York that makes me think about Shakespeare.

Kaufman quite often seems to manage to pull off one of the toughest challenges for any creative writer. He can give intellectual ideas an emotional resonance. He strives to avoid the movie cliches of characters' feelings. He knows if you're going to tackle the profound questions in a drama you have to give your characters emotional depth to make your audience ask them too.

Kaufman may not be up there with Shakespeare - who can ever be? - but I'm certainly grateful for a screenwriter who gets me thinking when I leave the cinema.

I've just put up two clips from Synecdoche, New York in a short piece about it on my site for ground-breaking screenwriters.
http://www.unique-screenwriting.com





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Burn After Reading. Think After Viewing.

I've been writing about the Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, today because their latest movie, Burn After Reading, opened the Venice Film Festival last night. These Award-winning screenwriters/directors intrigue me.

Their last film, No Country For Old Men, was, for me, a masterclass in screenwriting of originality and cinematic power. But the brilliant double-act are notoriously wary of wanting to seem serious about their work. The latest, stuffed with glamorous A-celebrities, whooping it up as near-parodies of their screen personas, must have been quite a relief after the majestic solemnity of No Country.

It's ostensibly a spy thriller, but as usual with the Coens, they've exploded the movie genre's rules, and turned the whole escapade into a story that's much more about how human beings get things wrong.

And that's what's interesting about their films. They can take a genre and do whatever they like with it. For all its humour, Burn After Reading has a pretty dark underbelly. A spoof spy thriller made to say something that's meaningful about marital infidelity, the cult of appearance and so on.

The improbable, convoluted plot involves a failed CIA analyst who's a neurotic alcoholic (John Malkovich), a sports trainer airhead who loves inflicting pain on his clients (Brad Pitt), a no-longer-young unmarried woman who's dream in life is to have a surgeon's knife slice off fat from her stomach and buttocks and inject her breasts with chemical polymers (Frances McDormand, wife of Joel Coen), a hypochrondiac who's a serial philanderer with a serious commitment problem (George Clooney), and a stuck-up Englishwoman (Tilda Swinton).

You can see, even from these brief descriptions of the characters, that the film's plot hardly matters. Tell that to the screenwriting gurus with their iron-clad '3-Act-Structure' and pre-set 'Plot Points' and 'Make it Plot-Driven!' commandments.

All the most exciting screenwriters and directors are blowing up the rule books - and winning awards not just in Europe but in Hollywood.

It's an invigorating time for movies because we're seeing how screenwriters are making their own rules -being inventive, original and genuinely ground-breaking. They're certainly inspiring me to keep going with my own voice, and making it drown out those hesitant doubts that so-called experts on creative writing try to crush me with.

Burn After Reading is fast and funny, but satire doesn't come better than this. Of course, the Coens just say it's a fun ride, but I think that's a little disengenuous of them. They seem to achieve something that I imagine most creative individuals would like to achieve. Sending the audience away with their minds stretched, and feeling a little less secure in their comfort-zone.

There's more about Burn After Reading with pictures and the movie trailer at Unique Screenwriting.
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