Director Charlie Kaufman

A discussion of one of America's most interesting film directors

Charlie Kaufman has been creator of some of the most unusual films of the last fifteen years.

 

His screenplays look at life through the wrong end of the telescope. His point of view turns the world on its ear and the new world, seen through his eyes, changes our view of our world forever.

 

In Being John Malkovich, he asks us to put ourselves in the position of being able to see the world, for a few minutes, through the eyes of another human, John Malkovich. The place where this is done is a hatchway behind a filing cabinet in an office where the ceilings are about four feet high, on floor 71/2. Sound wacky?  It is, and if you haven’t seen it, you’d better.

 

In Adaptation, Nicholas Cage portrays Charlie Kaufman as well as his brother Donald.  With today’s technology, “twinning” shots are much easier than they were in the days of Walt Disney’s The Parent Trap, or Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers.  Charlie intends to write a screenplay based upon a book by Susan Orlean  (Meryl Streep) titled The Orchid Thief.  He and his brother eventually are stalking Streep and the subject of her book.  It’s a droll and strange journey, wherein Charlie stalks Orlean and the subject of her book, John Laroche (Chris Cooper)

 

 

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which stars Jim Carrey (Joel) and Kate Winslet (Clementine). When they meet they do not realize that they were formerly involved. She went to a company called Lacuna and had all memories of him erased. When Joel realizes who Clementine is, he wants to undergo the same treatment.  Like his other films, Kaufman asks you to go on an unusual and unforgettable journey.

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Perhaps Kaufman’s most unusual film is Synedoche New York. The title is a pun on the name of the city Schenectady, New York.  A synecdoche  (sin-EK-dough-KEE) is an expression which can be singular or plural, such as “fish,” “cattle,” or “the man” when referring to police.

 

The movie is about mortality, and it is told with a very touching story.  Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a theatre director who is paranoid about his health. His marriage deteriorates when his wife Adele (Catherine Keener), a painter, takes his daughter Olive to Berlin, where she continues the pursuit of her career. After she leaves, Cotard is given a considerable award which he decides to spend staging a massive theatre work involving hundreds of actors, presented in a LARGE theatre space. The subject will be a representation of real life.

 

Time passes, but he is uncertain of how much. He marries the woman in charge of the box office. That fails, and then he marries a woman in his cast. The cast becomes populated by doppelgangers. Actor Tom Noonan plays Sammy Barnathan, who becomes a double of Cotard. Suddenly, his daughter is a teenager, and he has become completely unaware of this passage of time, since he is so wrapped up in his magnum opus.  Gradually, his autonomic functions begin to shut down.  This film is utterly amazing, and it needs to be seen several times in order to be able to pick up everything.

 

The film garnered a great deal of hostility  from the Cannes Festival crowd, which is surprising considering the quality of the piece.  Perhaps it is the underlying current that causes such a reaction.  It’s a film about the transitory quality of life, how it takes years to understand people and the events that have happened to you. Suffice it to say that the movie is amazing!

 

It is also a puzzling film, but it is truly worthwhile if you simply stick to it and view it carefully�"which means LISTEN to the jokes in the script and watch for everything and everyone that is in the movie