When you want a dose of the strange, go to Charlie Kaufman.
His scripts for Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, and my personal favourite, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, all play at the puckered seam where the unconscious meets the real; where unspeakable desires and spoken lies get mixed up. His characters -subtle and complex, a gift to the actors who play them- are never quite sure whether they’re awake or dreaming.
It doesn’t work all of the time, and there are moments in Human Nature and Adaptation that are just plain annoying, but at his best Kaufman helps us glimpse below the banalities of social mores to see how our unignorable, nethermost human needs drive our relationships. In this way he’s an incredibly imaginative and brave screenwriter, a contra-flow amidst the Hollywood churn, and someone whose films never fail to surprise.
Whether Kaufman can direct as well as he can write will be tested in his new film, Synecdoche, New York, which plays at the London Film Festival in October. The movie has the great good fortune of starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, aswell as a bevy of excellent actresses including Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton and Jennifer Jason-Leigh. Kaufman apparently conceived the film as a horror script for Spike Jonze to direct, inspired by some anxiety dreams Jonze was having. Once the script was done, Jonze was already stuck into his own project Where the Wild Things Are, so Kaufman took the reins himself.
P.S. A synecdoche (which I’m told is pronounced Sih-NECK-doh-kee) is a kind of metaphor, in which a part stands for a whole, or vice versa. An example would be “fifty sails crossed the sea”, where sail stands for ship. The title also plays on Schenectady, NY, a city in the east of New York state.
Confused? That’s part of the plan, according to Kaufman. “One of the things I think is really exciting and joyful about the experience of being an audience member is figuring things out,” he says. “When you make a connection, it’s yours, and there’s a thrill to that. So people can look up “synecdoche,” if they want. And if they do, maybe they’ll think about some things it might correspond to in the movie, and if it opens up another understanding of the film for them, that would be great.”
