Synechdoche: a figure of speech in which a part stands for a whole .

I finally got around to seeing "Synecdoche, NY" and after thinking about it, reading several reviews and talking about it a fair bit I have decided that I don’t like it. Which isn’t to say YOU shouldn’t see it. You should. It is a chaotic, ambitious and deeply flawed project, the likes of which we hardly ever see coming out of American Cinema. And while I KNOW that the Very First Thing I was trained to do in writing school was to put aside likes and dislikes and look at Structure, and Plot, and Character; whether or not I like something is still how I judge it. Sue me.
So in spite of the fact that it is Brilliant and Challenging and Ambitious (capital letters all) which are things I am usually a sucker for (see: my love of the giant fucking mess that is Southland Tales), why don’t I like it?
I want to be emotionally engaged with a movie. And while emotional engagement has a tricky/ controversial history in theatre history (Brecht: its BAD and DANGEROUS) it is still what I look for. I like it when movies make me feel patriotic (Independence Day) or thrilled (Jurassic Park) or remind me what love feels like (I Capture the Castle) or scared (Let the Right One In) or depressed (The Marriage of Maria Braun). I DO believe that catharsis is an important part of storytelling, even if it is as simple as yeah!-we-kicked-alien-ass! I still look for it in my film viewing experience.
Synecdoche keeps you at a distance, which is odd because the movie is about death, dying, losing and gaining love, the desire to make something, the love of a father, hatred, longing, art, and creativity. Big things that every human deals with at some point or another. I mean, we all die, and part of the movie is about mourning your own death. I distinctly remember the first time that the reality that I will someday die hit me. (I was at the Seattle Zoo. Make of that what you will.) And I believe that we all need to think about that fact every now and again, if nothing else to let us mourn and accept it. So yeah, that is totally something a movie should tackle.
Mahnola Dargis at the Times argues that the entire movie takes place in the five minutes it takes Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to die, and that the story is his mind, trying to make sense of his life:

“The curtain rises on his production, as it were, with a fade up to a digital clock reading 7:44 a.m. The film cuts to a shot of a man we soon come to know as Caden Cotard lying in bed… listening to a woman on the radio with a German accent talking about autumn as “the beginning of the end.” The radio host has announced that it’s Sept. 22, “the first day of fall.”
“It’s also the first day of Caden’s fall, the day his life begins to collapse, or, depending on how you read the signs, the day he dies. (Another clue: Cotard is the term for a delusion of people who believe that they are dead.) Near the close of the story, after Caden has grown old and stooped and people he loves have died, Mr. Kaufman suggests that the entire film has been a dream upon dying. As Caden totters around the enormous theater set that he has spent half his life creating, there’s a shot of a clock with its hands set to 7:45. A woman says in voice-over: “Now you are here, it’s 7:43. Now you are here, it’s 7:44. Now you are” — there’s a pause — “gone.” And then he is.”

She may very well be right. I have heard this exact same explanation put forward for another movie I don’t like very much in the same way that I don’t like Synecdoche: “Mullholand Drive.”
Both Synecdoche and Mullholand feel like they are going to add up to something, that in just five more minutes you will understand what is going on, you will have clarity, but neither movie gives it to you. David Lynch just does that with everything, but other Charlie Kaufman scripts have come together at the end into something heart breaking (the last shot of “Being John Malcovich” the restarting of the love affair in “Eternal Sunshine”). You could argue the Kaufman needs a director, but this movie is so blatantly more ambitious than previous (also incredibly ambitious) films that I'm not sure any director could make sense of it with out destroying it.
And what frustrates me about Synecdoche is that it has these moments of unbelievable beauty, most notably the very last five minutes, which I wanted desperately to give myself over to. I wanted to cry with Caden at the numerous funerals through out the film. I wanted to root for him and Hazel (Samantha Morton), to feel something when they get together, break up, get together. But because the movie is so unclear about what world we are in, and what time it is and what is going on, that I was too busy trying to figure out what the ef was going on to feel anything at all. Which left me frustrated and intellectually stimulated and unmoved.
None of which, really is a judgment call on the movie. Its a judgment call about myself. Everyone who has an interest in film and/or the creative process should see it. But I want to be given a chance to mourn the perfect script I will never write.
Charlie Kaufman came thisclose to giving it to me. And then he didn’t. Why won’t you give me catharsis, chuck?