Synecdoche NY, The Reader, Friday the 13th

The film takes place (supposedly) in Schenectady, New York, an actual town not far from where I grew up, pronounced kinda like the title. There´s a lot of wordplay in the movie, like when Caden Cadot (Philip Seymour Hoffman) tries to explain the difference between psychosis and sycosis to his daughter: “well, there´s two kinds of psychosis, they´re spelled differently, p-s-y is like when you´re crazy, like your mother, and s-y is like these ugly things on my face.” “But you could have both, though,” his daughter responds.

A plot rundown is pointless here, but I´ll try: theater director Caden Cadot is unhappy, fearing death, putting on a version of Death of a Salesman using young actors in the leading roles. He´s married to an artist Adele (Catherine Keener), who paints microscopic works that gallery patrons view while walking around wearing special magnifying glasses. They have a daughter, Olive; Adele takes her to an opening in Berlin, along with her ‘friend´ Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and never returns.

Eventually, Caden is given a genius grant, with (seemingly) limitless funds, to create a masterwork of art. He constructs the ultimate play – just like Kaufman has constructed this movie – a version, and vision, of his life, set in an impossibly large warehouse that reconstructs the entire city, with actors playing himself (Tom Noonan) and Hazel (Emily Watson) and even random people he passes on the street, and eventually, of course, actors playing these actors and so on. Each day the play grows larger, as life happens around him and he reconstructs it inside the warehouse walls.

The play is a synecdoche for life, as is life a synecdoche for the play, as is Synecdoche, New York, a synecdoche for life and the play it contains and so on and so forth until it comes back to you. It´s a vividly surreal masterwork on the level of Buñuel or Lynch that actually manages to elicit an emotional response along with the usual intellectual one. It´s something attempted in most of Kaufman´s screenplays, and most often cited by detractors. “The film is too smart for its own good,” “how can we care about these characters,” “they´re just pawns in an intellectual thesis.”

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Stephen Daldry´s The Reader, based on the novel by Bernhard Schlink, raises a lot of interesting moral questions, but it doesn´t quite know how to appropriately answer them. The first (and best) act of the film is an intensely erotic portrait of an affair between a 16-year-old boy and a (considerably) older woman. The second act takes place at a war crimes trial, and asks us what level of complicity in Nazi crimes is OK. The third act returns to the two characters, now much older, and the relationship. The film is mildly compelling and sumptuous to look at, but I found it unconvincing and potentially dangerous.

Germany, 1958: Michael Berg (David Kross) gets sick on the street (scarlet fever) and a kind woman cleans him up and helps him home. He returns to thank the woman, Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), catches a glimpse of her undressing, and thus begins a purely sexual affair that lasts for the summer. Hanna, however, seems to be more interested in having Michael read to her (she´s illiterate – if the reading didn´t illustrate that enough, a scene in which she stares, perplexed, at a café menu should.) Soon, the affair breaks down, Michael´s sexual curiosity satisfied, and (if one hasn´t read much about the film in advance) we wonder where this is going…

In 1966, Michael is at law school, studying under Professor Rohl (Bruno Ganz, who´s excellent here). Rohl brings his class to a war crimes trial, and Michael is shocked to find Hanna Schmitz sitting there in the defendant´s chair. Through some emotional testimony, we hear of Hanna´s past life as a concentration camp guard who, along with other defendants, selected prisoners to be executed. Incredibly, and unbelievably, Hanna is so embarrassed by her illiteracy that she takes full blame for leadership of the guards; the fact that she cannot write would have cleared her of some of it.

Major complaint: the film asks us to feel sympathy for Hanna Schmitz, with countless close-ups of Kate Winslet´s sad, regretful eyes staring contemplatively into the distance. It´s the ultimate testament to Winslet (who won an Oscar for her role) that some audiences may feel sympathy for this character, who, more than twenty years later, rationalizes that keeping a group of Jews locked in a burning church, rather than letting them out to potentially escape, was the right thing to do. Nazis were people too, of course, but I find this line of thinking dangerous – at the very least, there are other characters more deserving of our sympathy.

Finally, we recap Friday the 13th, Part 3, as Jason dons his famous hockey mask and slays some more campers. There´s a fragmented plot about a brother searching for his sister, who went missing – she was actually kidnapped by Jason and is now being held in his underground lair. Otherwise, the dramatic height is delivered by a concerned young man worried about his friends messing up his parent´s cottage – no less than five separate scenes are devoted to this thrilling plot point. A potentially bravura woodchipper finale is completely screwed up. End of movie.