BEST MOVIE OF THE YEAR

Distressingly personal but in the sense that one gains insight into not so much Kaufman as oneself, Synecdoche has made me introspective and, frankly, miserable since I first saw it. It's surgically invasive, and as such it's no surprise to me that it's had difficulty in both interpretation and distribution. I do wonder in a rhetorical way whether the film would be received differently were it a lost Kieslowski or a Godard at the peak of his narrative aggression, though it reminds more as a whole of David Lynch's "Hitchcock" pictures (Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive), which found in their rhythmic Americana banality the dull thrum of existential horror. Whatever its watermarks, the picture is Kaufman shot through--the answer to the question of what a film would look like if Kaufman stopped talking about love and started talking about the futility of love. It's a remarkable achievement, good enough that it should be pointless to argue its relative value. The only conversations worth having about Synecdoche are the ones that thoughtful people ultimately have about art: why is it affecting, why does it work, and, more specifically for a Kaufman film, how did it know? Heady, rich, emotionally rigorous, and unabashedly intellectual, it's a crystallization of what film can add to the philosophy of art--a benchmark for this moment in time. To not recognize that is a bad mistake, and a terrible shame.-Walter Chaw