Accismus

This extremely, extremely long movie from Charlie Kaufman bored me to tears. Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a theater director who breaks up with his wife, Adele (Catherine Keener), and then uses his MacArthur Award to continually stage a meta-world in a giant warehouse in New York City. He has an off-and-on affair with an affectionate but directionless ticket taker, Hazel (Samantha Morton), and an on-and-off marriage with his young ingenue, Claire (Michelle Williams). Each new person in his life gets a doppelganger cast in the performance (the most interesting thing about this is that Emily Watson is cast as Samantha Morton, and while I never would have said the two women look alike, they could be twins. It is uncanny. I actually thought Morton was playing her own double until the cast list scrolled). Anyway, all of this is very tedious and repetitive. When the film starts, it is very grounded in reality, but there are some odd, surrealistic details that seem like they may or may not be resolved later. As the film continues, the surreal is amped up and the reality dialed down, and all of those odd touches turn out to be symbol and metaphor – there is no through-plot in the traditional sense, nor is it really a character study; rather, it’s a sort of meta-exploration of living a life while simultaneously recording, analyzing, and replicating that life.

Personally, I thought the movie seemed like an unfocused, boring, lengthy stretch of navel-gazing, but my mother (who watched it with me) got a lot more out of it, and I now see that Roger Ebert understood it in pretty much the exact same way she did (best film of the decade?!), so I now realize I didn’t get it. Having had it explained to me, though, I still don’t really know why it needed to be a movie. The material was not particularly visual; it seemed like more of a novel. And in fact, it reminded me a lot of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, which I hated, but which a lot of people really thought was unique and important, so this type of material may just be beyond me.