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Synecdoche, New York
EMAILPRINTSony Pictures Classics
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 34 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 112 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Comedy | Drama
Written by: Charlie Kaufman
Directed by: Charlie Kaufman
Release Date:
Theatrical: October 24, 2008
DVD: March 10, 2009
Running Time: 124 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for language and some sexual content/nudity
Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dianne Wiest, Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Hope Davis, and Tom Noonan
Theater director Caden Cotard is mounting a new play. His life catering to suburban blue-hairs at the local regional theater in Schenectady, New York is looking bleak. His wife Adele has left him to pursue her painting in Berlin, taking their young daughter Olive with her. His therapist, Madeleine Gravis, is better at plugging her best-seller than she is at counseling him. A new relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel has prematurely run aground. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one. Worried about the transience of his life, he leaves his home behind. He gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in New York City, hoping to create a work of brutal honesty. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a growing mockup of the city outside. (Sony Classics)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
The New York Times Manohla Dargis
To say that Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
I think you have to see Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York twice. I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film and that I had not mastered it. The second time because I needed to. The third time because I will want to.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Travis Nichols
Although obviously a stretched and lightly drawn caricature -- the cerebral writer is obsessed with his work, has metaphorical skin problems, can't have sex without weeping, etc. -- Cotard is real. Or as real a representation of an artist as we're likely to get in this biopic age.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Synecdoche is the kind of movie that rewards repeated viewings. But sometimes, as Van Morrison sings, it's just best to "sail into the mystic."
Read Full Review >Empire Andrew Male
Astonishing. Kaufman has surpassed himself with a film that will delight and confound. You will want to see it again. And again.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
In effect, Caden's life passes before his eyes while he is living it. And Kaufman shares this effect with us through a strange process he achieves with invisible strings; it's a knockout.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Corliss
No film with an ambition this large, and achievement this impressive, can be anything but exhilarating, a vital affirmation of the creative process.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
It's got more imagination than half a dozen movies combined; there's nothing else out there like this, and to me that's a very good thing.
Read Full Review >Premiere Emily Rems
At turns as neurotic and nebbishy as any Woody Allen flick, as creepy and disorienting as your favorite "Twilight Zone" episode, and as steeped in magical realism as the most moving Márquez novel, Synecdoche may not be the feel-good date movie of the year. But for viewers up for the challenge, it may be the film most likely to stick with you.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
I can't pretend to know fully what Charlie Kaufman is up to in Synecdoche, New York, with all the doubled characters, dreamy reenactments, comical minutiae, and personal unhappiness. But I got a great deal of pleasure out of watching him mount his fantasia about an artist suffering not simply for his art, but because of it.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
As a director, Kaufman isn't yet his own best salesman. He's not enough of a visual stylist to sell his script's most challenging conceits. But the cast rises to a very strange and rich occasion.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
For this master of mindfuckery, Synecdoche, New York probably qualifies as a magnum opus, since it essentially multiplies "Adaptation" by an exponential factor and thus grows into a snarling, ungainly beast of self-reflexive absurdities.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Mariko McDonald
It is a sprawling, ambitious and very long look at so many things, it's almost a miracle he was able to wrap it up in just two hours. And yet, for a film that is principally about death, the conclusion is surprisingly life-affirming, especially coming from Kaufman.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano
Sprawling, awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, frustrating, hard-to-follow and achingly, achingly sad movie.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Scott Foundas
Like most of Kaufman's work as a writer, Synecdoche, New York is a head trip that time and again returns to a place of real human emotion--in this case, to the idea that no matter how brilliant we may be or think we are, we're all looking for a little guidance (or, yes, direction) in life.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett
Will mesmerize some and mystify others, while many will be bored silly. It's not a dream, Kaufman says, but it has a dreamlike quality, and those won over by its otherworldly jigsaw puzzle of duplicated characters, multiple environments and shifting time frames will dissect it endlessly.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
A wildly ambitious and gravely serious contemplation of life, love, art, human decay and death, the film bears Kaufman’s scripting fingerprints in its structural trickery and multiplane storytelling.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Philip Seymour Hoffman creates a mesmerizing portrait of the artist as a young, old and middle-aged man.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
In Synecdoche, Kaufman the screenwriter is not well-served by Kaufman the filmmaker. As a director, his propensity for heavyosity leadens rather than leavens this affair.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Joe Neumaier
Hoffman, Morton and Jon Brion's aching score somehow capture the all-too-human need to get things right. If you're in a certain frame of mind, those moments make up for all the stagecraft.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
Strives to be a work of greatness. But Kaufman's overarching vision is a lot less interesting than the small insights he gathers along the way. This is what happens when life imitates art, and blows it.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Just because a movie is ambitious and challenging doesn't mean it can't also be tedious and at times unbearable.
Read Full Review >Slate Dana Stevens
The problem is that the movie's worldview, in the end, isn't expansive enough to justify the (quite literal) stage it takes place on.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
There has long been a strain of sorry lassitude in Kaufman's work, and here it sickens into the morbid.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
The temptation to be emphatic about Synecdoche, New York is overwhelming but should be resisted, because the movie really is a mixed bag. A particularly odd mix.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
It seems more like an illustration of his (Kaufman) script than a full-fledged movie, proving how much he needs a Spike Jonze or a Michel Gondry to realize his surrealistic conceits.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Here, there's not much that's funny, there's too much that's too clever by half, and there's not a damn thing that's lively - this is a film about Life whose sin is its lifelessness.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
As the movie rambles along with its own brand of quasi-magical surrealism, the links to real experience grow scarcer and more frayed.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
Watching the film is also wearying, like assembling a puzzle from a box into which a sadist continually pours new pieces. I was still processing details when the abrupt ending snatched the puzzle away.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
It's heartbreaking how rich this failed project is, with enough poetry for several great movies, but not enough push for one.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
The film disappoints terribly, too. The directorial debut of such an imaginative and clever screenwriter was a highly anticipated event. His "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" are two of the most innovative and intriguing movies of the past decade. Synecdoche is one of the most maddening.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
I gave up making heads or tails of Synecdoche, New York, but I did get one message: The compulsion to stand outside of one's life and observe it to THIS degree isn't the mechanism of art -- it's the structure of psychosis.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.5 (out of 10) based on 112 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Larry B gave it a10:
This film is beautiful. It has captured the workings of the mind over the course of a life, magically compressed into roughly two hours. Of course it is sad. People who complain about how 'depressing' it is have no interest in film as an illuminating art form; they only want shallow escapism. So, the film isn't for everyone. Yet it is not just sad. It also illustrates the humor of its situations perfectly. After all, comedy is tragedy flipped upside down. This movie is not a head trip for the sake of being a head trip, as some claim. It is sensitive in its exploration of the psyche. It does have a heart. It's just that the heart gets broken.
Maya G gave it a10:
Tedious, boring, pointless??? this movie is not for the impatient, short-attention spanned, shallow-thinking average american viewer. it's a puzzle, a poem, a work of art--expansive and condensed, all at once. so detailed it must be read rather than watched (over and over again. and each reading yields something new). thank god for charlie kaufman. he's one of the few that fights the true tedium in american cinema today--the humdrum, paint-by-number, blockbuster crap that passes for film.
Hugo T gave it a10:
First, it's OK with me if you didn't find this to be an excellent movie because, frankly, I have nothing against the dead.
J Jones gave it a3:
Oh my gosh this is a tedious and depressing movie. I usually go head first into these types of films (I greatly enjoyed David Lynch's challenging Inland Empire), but I just couldn't take it. This movie seems to have no reason to live other than to obsessively, repeatedly, depressingly explore a tragic and possibly psychotic worldview. This film has many fans which will gladly dole out shallow judgment upon those who will not submit to this whiny, annoying movie, but I submit that they are either in love with the idea of such a film (and not the film itself) or they are so desensitized that it takes this kind of horror-disguised-as-drama to get through. I am sooooo tired of blue color-cast, shoe-gazing films about how terrible the human experience is. Heck, even the shows and commercials on TV all seem to be turning blue just to follow suit. Just because you are depressed, psychotic and have a large budget does not mean you have the right to inflict such a monstrosity on the public.
Ellen B gave it a9:
I wonder if the difference between liking this film and not liking it depend on whether Kaufman's preoccupations are your preoccupations and if they are not. Personally, I felt like someone I had never met must know me perfectly. Despite the darkness and sadness of much of the film, it was hugely liberating to know that others feel those same fears when it comes to trying to live life and spend much of their time resisting a kind of oppressive narcissism that gets in the way of every human connection they make. Kaufman has presented a particular kind of neurosis, with all its petty humiliations and sweeping tragedy, to perfection. I couldn't give it a perfect score because it feels like such a deeply personal film, but it will resonate with me for a very, very long time.
Pixie Eleven gave it a10:
A thoroughly devastating film, a masterpiece.
Paul D gave it a4:
Dreamlike exploration of a creative life whose attention to detail and stellar cast are undone by glacial pace and listless direction. An ambitious failure that shows that Kaufman the writer is best served by a non-Kaufman director.
