Caden Cotard In Synecdoche, New York
Few films in the 21st century have challenged an audience as much as Synecdoche, New York (heck, even most of the people in the box office line could not even pronounce its title correctly). However, audiences who found Charlie Kaufman’s drama confounding were still likely riveted by Hoffman’s gigantic, uncompromising turn as a mad theatre director whose life becomes the focus of a most ambitious staging.
It is hard to think of another actor who could have brought Caden Cotard, a theatre director battling with his own misery, to life with such depth and luminosity. As the tortured artist, Hoffman is a revelation. Moving between states of reality and deranged fantasy (or is it a fallacy?), he keeps the film grounded and the viewer absorbed in the character’s mental madness. Cotard has his regrets and dismays and hopes that the plays he stages can teach others how not to screw up as much as he did. He keeps on casting new women to be his leading lady (i.e. his wife). He feels that his body is betraying him and he can only use his mind as a weapon to combat the oppressive feelings he has toward everyone. The saying goes that art imitates life. And so, a man unhappy with life is filled with a dizzying ambition to tell a play about the people and problems in his life.
In his character’s magnum opus that unfolds in the second half of the film, Hoffman injects the bruising, painful, melancholy bursts that makes us admire and pity Cotard at once. As the deranged but not defeated director, Hoffman mines both sadness and hope in the portrayal, creating something staggering and infinitely heartbreaking. It is one of the actor’s most defiant, daring performances, and one so essential to the success of Kaufman’s film that it is hard to imagine this incomparable drama without him.