Oscar-winning screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman is known simply by some for creating quirky, out of the box concepts. Armchair philosophers and film school nerds on the other hand, would argue he serves devastating truths about the human condition. Truths through the lens of white male privilege of course, but truths nonetheless. (I’m on the side of the armchair experts and film nerds by the way.)

Fans will be hugely excited to learn that he has a debut novel due for release in July 2020. Available to pre-order now, Antkind is ‘a searing indictment of the modern world’ and ‘a richly layered meditation on art, time, memory, identity, comedy, and the very nature of existence itself―the grain of truth at the heart of every joke’. Funny, because that’s how you could describe many of his films, too. In anticipation of Antkind, I was compelled to reappraise the work of this somewhat underappreciated genius.

Synecdoche, New York

After multiple re-watches, I still haven’t fully cracked this one and I think that’s the point. Like life, you’ll never fully understand its whole meaning. You might come very close, but then you’ll die. I won’t offer my theories here, as like any work of art, people will take their own meaning from it. And there is almost too much to understand in this film – every frame, let alone every scene, has deeper significance that you won’t catch on the first watch. Even the title, Synecdoche, isn’t what it first appears. 

We follow Philip Seymour Hoffman as a struggling theatre director named Caden Cotard (again, not just a name), who is trying to make a play that will be his magnum opus. He attempts to capture the truth of all (his own) life experience through art, but the art ends up mirroring or even recreating his life in minute detail. It gets bigger and bigger until the stage takes over the entire city. His life becomes indistinguishable from the art, which is a metaphor for Kaufman’s own experience in making this film.

One of my favourite elements of this is its dark humour. Caden’s love interest Hazel (Samantha Morton) buys a house that’s on fire. As she looks around with the realtor, her assessment is classic: ‘I like it. I do! I’m just really concerned about dying in the fire.’ Joking aside, this is an important point about Hazel’s character – unlike Caden, Hazel has accepted that one day she will die, but decides to enjoy what life has to offer anyway (even if it is a burning mess).

I could go on forever about this film, but there is one scene I absolutely have to mention. Later on in his production, Caden watches a funeral scene where the pastor (Christopher Evan Welch – taken before his time) delivers a moving and darkly funny speech concluding with ‘F everybody, Amen.’ At this point, another director has taken over from Caden and achieved what he had spent years trying to convey about life, in just two minutes. Even if you pass on the rest of the film, watch this.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Tennyson, not Shakespeare, said ‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.’ Kaufman explores this concept in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is based on the idea of an invention that erases the memories of romantic relationships post break-up. The literary title is derived from an Alexander Pope poem, Eloisa to Abelard, which contemplates lost love.

The end is in the beginning – our protagonist, Joel (Jim Carrey), has already broken up with Clementine (Kate Winslet) when they meet and embark on a relationship. With his memories erased, he goes on to make the same ‘mistake’ again. There lies the conceit of the film – if we have our memories erased, we lose the pain but we also lose the joy, and we will never learn from our mistakes. Wasn’t it a worthwhile experience to meet Clementine, to open up and learn more about himself, even if it didn’t end well?

Being John Malkovich

So, on first look this sounds like the acid-induced fever dream of a deranged lunatic. Essentially, the premise is that an unemployed puppeteer (John Cusack) takes up residence in the mind of actor John Malkovich in order to achieve romantic and career success. It might seem bizarre and meaningless at first, but then you find yourself asking the question – are we just meat puppets being inhabited by some enduring consciousness, entirely incongruous with our physical form..?

Adaptation

This film features Nicholas Cage. (I really wanted to end the review there because, sold.) In arguably the best performance of his career, Cage plays Charlie Kaufman himself, trying to adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (great book, worth reading) into a screenplay. Writer’s block is a central theme as the neurotic ‘Charlie’ finds it impossible to adapt this book, while his twin brother Donald (who is much more ‘simple’ in every way) picks up screenwriting and runs away with it immediately. He completely changes the meaning and content of the original work – adding in multiple clichés, drugs, sex and an alligator fight. All of this is of course an ironic comment on the Hollywood machine – what sells isn’t necessarily ‘good,’ true or meaningful, and conversely, watching a screenwriter struggle over his art doesn’t make good entertainment. I’m not saying this is a bad film, it’s a film about making a bad film!

One of the highlights has to be Brian Cox’s impassioned rant: “Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There’s genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ’s sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know crap about life! And why the FUCK are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don’t have any use for it! I don’t have any bloody use for it!” Charlie looks up, destroyed, and mutters: “okay.. thanks.”

I have yet to see Kaufman’s latest film, Anomalisa, because the puppets creep me out, but I’m looking forward to I’m Thinking of Ending Things, due to be released this year and I will definitely be reading Antkind.

“We’re all hurtling towards death. Yet here we are, for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we’re going to die. Each of us secretly believing we won’t.”
― Charlie Kaufman, Synecdoche, New York