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Jun. 26th, 2009 01:34 amWatched Synecdoche, NY tonight, which we're very late on returning because we kept wanting something pleasant or entertaining and it didn't look pleasant or entertaining and then finally we watched it and it wasn't pleasant or entertaining. And yes that sentence was a parody: what an anthology of heavy-handed ways to make iffy points. It reminded me of a humor-drained version of the glorious Top Secret where over and over again thousands of man hours and dollars go into providing an absurd second meaning to some straight line of dialogue. Visual puns. And it rocked. Top Secret is sublime, and Synecdoche is a trainwreck.
But one I can't help sympathizing with. Kaufman launched Being John Malkovich off of The Man With Two Brains, or half-memories of it I guess, and here he does something similar with Belly of an Architect, which is as great in its way as Top Secret - and becomes even better when you go to Rome and fully grasp how Greenaway was using the city. Kaufman marries it to the Faust fantasy-about-a-fantasizer tradition - its high points being Peer Gynt and the key sections of Ulysses (McCarthy disorientingly dovetails the Border Trilogy into it too in its final pages), but carried into cinema in Brief Encounter, Pickpocket, American Gigolo and Eyes Wide Shut. Not to be deliberately cruel to Kaufman, but I think he was mostly working from Gigolo. The guy's artistic unconscious is all '80s movies. The Kafka and Borges are superficial grafts.
Anyway, in this movie art gets saved from Greenaway's strangely wistful (how much of that was Dennehy stealing his film?) condemnation by an embrace-of-the-self-in-the-other-and/or-vice-versa type deal, which lesson learned allows the world to fall away with only that ambiguous mother/wife/muse figure remaining to either sing away death or kill what is deadly in it (this should maybe be called the La Pieta tradition, this thing I'm talking about - viewing La Pieta as a man properly should, that is, with yourself as/in place of Jesus). But it doesn't work. We're reaching a point where ambition alone doesn't do it. Ambition once pushed the envelope but the envelope is now pushed to pieces for this kind of thing (I'm not agreeing with Greenaway, just noting a new way to fail). You need that strange traction of discovery that makes the story you tell yourself almost the same one you're telling the audience - not just a movie vast in time or depth or inclusiveness but possessing that freshness, that startling yourself in the act of startling yourself, that art needs; it once attached to grand schemes near-automatically, but past grandnesses are starting to fill up the local bits, the nearer stretches of the human imagination's 360 degrees. Derived works get schematic, feel like scaffolding (portraying scaffolding does not totemically ward off the tiredness of that). It's what Goethe said about skipping steps, except we've reached a point where you can collage your way through to the end anyway, Frankenstein your way to some amount of critical success. One of the most ambitious movies ever made, Synecdoche doesn't matter much because it isn't doing anything that it regards as fresh, except for scraps of weird and of humor, which would have all flown much better in rather different films. Self-awareness of failure may add some ironic value to the movie, considering its subject, but only at the expense of its primary value.
Simpler rephrasing of all of the above: Kaufman needs Spike Jonze, who is nowhere near as bright but clearly a rather finer artist, more of a discoverer - of things others discovered before him, sure, but no matter. Hell, Kaufman may even be brighter than David Lynch, who has his flake side but may be the greatest genius in all cinema after Kurosawa and Bergman. Maybe you need two brains in one.
But one I can't help sympathizing with. Kaufman launched Being John Malkovich off of The Man With Two Brains, or half-memories of it I guess, and here he does something similar with Belly of an Architect, which is as great in its way as Top Secret - and becomes even better when you go to Rome and fully grasp how Greenaway was using the city. Kaufman marries it to the Faust fantasy-about-a-fantasizer tradition - its high points being Peer Gynt and the key sections of Ulysses (McCarthy disorientingly dovetails the Border Trilogy into it too in its final pages), but carried into cinema in Brief Encounter, Pickpocket, American Gigolo and Eyes Wide Shut. Not to be deliberately cruel to Kaufman, but I think he was mostly working from Gigolo. The guy's artistic unconscious is all '80s movies. The Kafka and Borges are superficial grafts.
Anyway, in this movie art gets saved from Greenaway's strangely wistful (how much of that was Dennehy stealing his film?) condemnation by an embrace-of-the-self-in-the-other-and/or-vice-versa type deal, which lesson learned allows the world to fall away with only that ambiguous mother/wife/muse figure remaining to either sing away death or kill what is deadly in it (this should maybe be called the La Pieta tradition, this thing I'm talking about - viewing La Pieta as a man properly should, that is, with yourself as/in place of Jesus). But it doesn't work. We're reaching a point where ambition alone doesn't do it. Ambition once pushed the envelope but the envelope is now pushed to pieces for this kind of thing (I'm not agreeing with Greenaway, just noting a new way to fail). You need that strange traction of discovery that makes the story you tell yourself almost the same one you're telling the audience - not just a movie vast in time or depth or inclusiveness but possessing that freshness, that startling yourself in the act of startling yourself, that art needs; it once attached to grand schemes near-automatically, but past grandnesses are starting to fill up the local bits, the nearer stretches of the human imagination's 360 degrees. Derived works get schematic, feel like scaffolding (portraying scaffolding does not totemically ward off the tiredness of that). It's what Goethe said about skipping steps, except we've reached a point where you can collage your way through to the end anyway, Frankenstein your way to some amount of critical success. One of the most ambitious movies ever made, Synecdoche doesn't matter much because it isn't doing anything that it regards as fresh, except for scraps of weird and of humor, which would have all flown much better in rather different films. Self-awareness of failure may add some ironic value to the movie, considering its subject, but only at the expense of its primary value.
Simpler rephrasing of all of the above: Kaufman needs Spike Jonze, who is nowhere near as bright but clearly a rather finer artist, more of a discoverer - of things others discovered before him, sure, but no matter. Hell, Kaufman may even be brighter than David Lynch, who has his flake side but may be the greatest genius in all cinema after Kurosawa and Bergman. Maybe you need two brains in one.
