I love Synecdoche, New York. I love it with a strange abandon that is both painfully obvious and beautifully mysterious. I love its ballsy ambition and fearlessness -- a fearlessness that nearly teeters over the edge of its own message and reason, and yet remains entirely harmonized and rooted in real life. I've examined the movie numerous ways. It hits me personally. The movie crawls into my body, and pokes at places that are tender to the touch -- places I might choose to have left well enough alone. It makes me think of dreams, my own dreams, and theories of dreams, specifically Jungian (but I don't want to crawl into that particular portal at this moment). It reminds me of one of my literary heroes, Dostoyevsky and the concept of the doppelgänger (from Dostoevsky's brilliant The Double). It takes me to Fellini, Bunuel, Bergman. But it's all Charlie Kaufman.
I know a few people, many of them Kaufman admirers, who detest this picture. Upon first viewing, I witnessed strangers in the theater actively despise the movie, awakening from their annoyed torpor, shaking their heads to say "what a load of self indulgent crap." It was like emerging from a bizarre-o Woody Allen film only to walk into a real live Woody Allen movie, with Kaufman serving as Fellini. But I wasn't baffled by such responses, and I'm not going to challenge a viewer's contempt. I can't pull the "they just don't get it" routine. No, they just don't like it. And sometimes (sometimes) when a viewer hates a movie with that much Rex Reed foaming lather, they're actually getting more out of it than those who don't.
I don't feel it necessary to break down the plot. Selfishly, I'm returning back to myself, wondering why I like it so much. Why did the movie get to me, and beyond attempting to figure out its labyrinthian plot and outside-looking-in meta-movie-within-a play structure? Synecdoche deals with failure and death and creativity and disgusting rot and self absorption and is-that-all-there-is ponderances with such inspired aspiration and genuine soulfulness, I was left swooning with the idea that we are indeed, special and yet, not special at all. It's Benjamin Button's ugly brother showing his reality through his own kind of disorienting cinematic dreamscape. It frightens me. And yet, I love it.
So, now, I will discuss all of this (or none of it) tonight, on stage with Charlie Kaufman at Ebertfest (with Michael Barker and Nell Minow also on board). You can watch it streaming, live tonight here, some time after 10 PM Central Time. Good luck to all.
Update: Here's part of the discussion. Kaufman was brilliant and a charming fellow:
I was asked again. If you could please discuss a classic film, any film, that's a masterpiece and one that you especially love. That's both easy and incredibly tough. As they say, the sky's the limit. Movies like The Third Man, Chinatown, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Trouble in Paradise, Baby Face, The Tenant, Baby Doll, Detour, Wicked Woman, Sunset Blvd., Out of the Past, Two-Lane Black Top, Marnie and more clutter my head. I can't decide. And then there's the entire ouvre of Tuesday Weld (good and bad -- I'm like Tiny Tim, I'll watch all of her). Where to begin?
Since I've been slammed with moving (books. And more books. And then more books. Beautiful books, but books), and am now of to Eberfest where I will be discussing Synecdoche, New York with Charlie Kaufman, and Barfly with Barbet Schroeder, among other movies and guests, I yearned to post some movie love. This picture is not showing at the Festival, but is one of the movies that pops into my head when asked: "What is your favorite movie"? So please excuse the re-post, I will write from Ebertfest. As well as getting down with some Booker T and the MG's. I won't cook baby corn, however. Well, maybe when I return home. As long as the cops don't catch me...
With that, the sublime, perfect The Third Man:
In 1948, British novelist Graham Greene wrote this bit of character description for a movie treatment on which he was working: "Don't picture Harry Lime as a smooth scoundrel. He wasn't that. The picture I have of him...is an excellent one: he is caught by a street photographer with his stocky legs apart, big shoulders a little hunched, a belly that has known too much good food for too long, on his face a look of cheerful rascality, a geniality, a recognition that his happiness will make the world's day." A year later, that rascal later turned out to be an oddly gorgeous Orson Welles, and the movie became The Third Man, a picture that in spirit matches the lilting recklessness of Greene's character.
The Third Man is an exquisite work of discordant power crammed full of shifting moods. An expressionist film noir, it reveals a dark, unsettling pessimism in its ravaged night atmosphere. A jaunty, bittersweet comedy, it conveys a soulful playfulness among its likable characters. A stylistic achievement, it is a baroque composition of the absurd, a tilted wonder of visual anxiety. It is dreamlike and sensible, seamless and jagged, heartbreaking and hilarious and oddly, mockingly wistful, despite its sad ending. Greene's words that Lime's happiness "will make the world's day" are key. It isn't simply that Greene wrote a likable villain; he wrote a lovable story -- even though it revealed the paranoia and unease that would later characterize the Cold War.
Directed by Carol Reed (who also directed Greene's masterful The Fallen Idol), photographed by Robert Krasker and beautifully scored by Anton Karas, The Third Man is a rare work of art that tickles as much as it torments. The story takes place in Allied-occupied Vienna. During the film's opening moments, a narrator (voiced by director Reed) states it's "the classic period of the black market when the city is divided into four zones, each occupied by a power -- the American, the British, the Russian, and the French. But the center of the city--that's international, policed by an International Patrol. What a hope they had, all strangers to the place and none of them could speak the same language. Vienna doesn't really look any worse than a lot of other European cities, bombed about a bit." Enter an American into this rubble of sadness and crooked opportunity: American hack novelist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a jobless "poor chap, happy as a lark and without a cent," seeking out his old friend Harry Lime (Welles), who has promised him a job. Unfortunately, Holly learns that his school chum was run over by a truck, a death that seems increasingly unlikely to the American.
A conspiracy emerges -- that of the mysterious "third man," who supposedly helped carry Harry's dead body out of view -- and the naive Holly is impassioned (or stupid) enough to become entrenched in it. In an odd, unconventional teaming, Holly develops a relationship with both Harry's lover, Anna (Alida Valli), to whom he's sexually drawn, and a British investigating officer named Calloway (Trevor Howard), who wishes the hayseed American would mind his own business. Holly also meets an assortment of exotic characters -- friends of Harry's -- and they aid in developing the film's humorous predicament of Western writer Holly attempting to work with such bizarre Kafkaesque visions. Crooked, gargoyle-like and most certainly not American, these multilingual characters further exemplify how ridiculous Holly's American optimism is. Externally and internally there is a cynicism presented to Holly, who, like the characters in his pulp novels, attempts to work on basic levels of good and evil. However, the complexities that Holly faces are neither black nor white.
The movie makes sure to display both character and situation with a jaunty and jaundiced flavor. There is no such thing as simplicity in The Third Man, a concept that's continually underscored by the film's style. Visually, it is an off-kilter intersection of vertical and horizontal lines (some scenes feel framed by the tilt of a man's hat) and a textured variety of high-contrast, low-key lighting techniques. Characters emerge from and duck back into shadows, a visual device Reed uses metaphorically to represent moral complexity. Karas' score is also wonderfully unpredictable. Bouncy, beautiful, ugly and panicky, the music follows and responds to the action like an id let loose. The score also conveys the irresistible, crooked charm of Harry Lime -- a figure so prominent that you forget he is in just a half-hour of the film.
But then Reed gave Orson Welles one of the most famous entrances in movie history: A cat walks down the street, spies a man's shoes in a darkened doorway, curls up at his feet and meows loudly enough for Holly to notice from across a street. A window opens, and light flickers on Lime, and the camera holds a mysterious, mischievous and disarmingly smiling face. Welles (as Lime) looks back at Holly with eyes that silently return the two men back to childhood. Seductive, playful and enigmatic, this moment is suspended with an overwhelming sense of rapture (I get chills, and sometimes tear up every time I watch it) and makes you understand what Anna later says about Lime: "Harry never grew up. The world grew up around him." You forget about the terrible things he's done. You just want to follow him, anywhere, no matter what the repercussions.
These complicated emotions might cause anxiety and hardship, but they may result in delight, which is what makes The Third Man so unique among movies. The film is about expressing the inexpressible feelings that are gnarled in our psyches as fantasies or nightmares. It gets to the heart of that "obscure object of desire" without ever delineating just what it is we yearn for. A timeless masterpiece, The Third Man both restores your hope and breaks your heart.
"Harry never grew up. The world grew up around him."
After discussing this performance as one of my favorite Marilyn Monroe roles, I'm revisiting "Don't Bother to Knock," a movie that not only boasts Monroe's skills, but a wonderfully nuanced Richard Widmark as well.
Oh, Marilyn. I know, I know, we all love Marilyn Monroe (or we're supposed to) but I’m not going to stray from Norma Jean simply because she’s so popular. The tragic princess to every aspiring starlet or little girl or grown woman is our coffee mugged goddess, so ubiquitous that, I think, we sometimes take her for granted. Especially in her early and later roles (my two favorite periods for Marilyn). From the fresh faced, sublimely natural starlet sporting jeans in Fritz Lang’s Clash By Night, to the methody, tired, tragic and lonely lady of John Huston's The Misfits, I find Marilyn’s first and last hopes at proving herself on screen immensely powerful.
Such is the case in Monroe's first starring vehicle, 1952's Don't Bother to Knock. There’s a prophetic sadness permeating her moving, fascinating performance, and for a picture of this period, her delusional babysitter (freshly released from an insane asylum) is surprisingly sympathetic. Knowing all we do about the troubled star, it most likely wasn't a stretch for the then-relative newcomer to understand the pathology and despondency of her character Nell, a beautiful young woman burned by love who can't handle the breach between reality and fiction. A film noir of sorts, director Roy Baker's part-thriller, part-character-study is a tense tale with plenty of pathos geared toward Marilyn, who wasn't the full-blown MM superstar yet. As Nell, a mysterious girl who takes on a babysitting job in a hotel (the hotel locale, with its windows, elevators, phones and speaker system is used brilliantly here) where her creepy, sad-sack uncle (the great Elisha Cook Jr. -- perfect casting) works, Monroe enters the picture in plain clothes, darker blonde hair, and little makeup. Though she's no plain-Jane, she looks like a "nice girl" -- nice enough for hotel guests the Joneses (played by Jim Backus and Lurene Tuttle) to allow a stranger to watch over their cute little daughter Bunny (Donna Corcoran). After quickly putting the girl to bed (clearly she's not interested in the kid), Nell plays dress-up in Mrs. Jones' fine silk robe, perfume, and diamond jewelry. Norma Jean no more. Oh, to be glamorous.
Meanwhile, cocky, self-absorbed airline pilot Jedd Towers (a layered, and sexy Richard Widmark) is stinging from rejection after the hotel chanteuse (a young, gorgeous Anne Bancroft) dumps him. Spying the beautiful Nell from his window to hers (in an incredibly erotic flirtation) he finds some new action when lonely Nell signals him from her room. He comes over for a good time, likes what he sees, and puts up with her strange behavior until it gets a little too freaky, a little too desperate, a little too sad. When she comes on strong, something most men would dream of, he exclaims, confused and annoyed: "You bother me! I can't figure you out! You're silk on one side and sandpaper on the other!" MM answers all breathless tragic: "I'll be whatever you want me to be!" Well, this is just too strange, especially from a woman this beautiful. And so he asks the sensible, though perplexed question: "Why?" Indeed. A man, even Richard Widmark, even Tommy Udo Richard Widmark (well...maybe that's a stretch) can only take so much, and so, when Nell hangs Bunny out of the hotel window, he really starts thinking she might not be worth the tumble. But here’s the poignant part -- Nell doesn't really mean any harm. She's disturbed, frequently suicidal, something terrible happened to this poor woman. She needs help. And here’s a novel idea -- she desires a man to take care of her without hitting her for seeming odd, or hollering at her desire to look gorgeous. She should be normal dammit!
But, why? Why must women have to be so normal? Though suffering from deep-seated psychological problems that need to be addressed by professionals (but not in an asylum, where Monroe's mother landed in real life, and later, for a spell, Monroe), I sense that it’s this type of "normal" pressure that's making her crack (the punishing and smarmy Cook Jr. doesn't help either). Monroe portrays these pressures with beautiful soulfulness, so much so, that I wondered how much of her real life was seeping into her performance. I kept wishing that she could just get out of that hotel, doll herself up and have some fun with a man who might understand her, or a woman for that matter (Thelma Ritter, Monty Clift and Clark Gable would come so much later). Widmark isn't really the one, even though underneath his smirk and swagger, he’s essentially a good heart for not taking advantage of this broken woman. But then, the moral of the story comes at Nell's expense -- Widmark’s Jedd becomes a better, more decent man by not giving into temptation with a supposed psycho (which, in Widmark's strong, able hands, is entirely believable). And so Nell will stay Nell. Nuts. Poor Nell, and poor Marilyn. In real life, most men wouldn't be sensitive enough to resist. And those Uncle Elisha Cook Jr.'s are everywhere.
These complicated emotions might cause anxiety and hardship, but they may result in delight, which is what makes The Third Man so unique among movies. The film is about expressing the inexpressible feelings that are gnarled in our psyches as fantasies or nightmares. It gets to the heart of that "obscure object of desire" without ever delineating just what it is we yearn for. A timeless masterpiece, The Third Man both restores your hope and breaks your heart. 
