Synecdoche, New York (2008) on Netflix
Theater director Caden Cotard's wife Adele leaves for Berlin with their daughter. A fellowship lets him stage a play of brutal realism inside a warehouse replica of New York.
- Netflix3.1/5
- IMDb7.5/10105,924 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes69%
Trailer
Plot summary
Caden Cotard, a theater director in Schenectady, is beset by mysterious ailments while his marriage to Adele, a painter who works on a microscopic scale, comes apart. Couples therapy fails, and Adele moves to Berlin with their four-year-old daughter, Olive. The success of his production of Death of a Salesman brings an unexpected MacArthur Fellowship, and with it the means for a project on a huge scale. Caden wants a play of brutal realism and honesty, a work he can commit himself to entirely. He assembles a company in a vast warehouse in Manhattan's theater district, where the performers are asked to inhabit their parts continuously inside a scale model of the surrounding city. Hazel, who works at his box office, is among those drawn into his orbit.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Synecdoche, New York (2008)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Spike Jonze was originally set to direct the film but left to make Where the Wild Things Are instead, so Charlie Kaufman took over directing himself; because he was an untested director, Sony Pictures Classics dropped out and Sidney Kimmel Entertainment stepped in with the film's $20 million budget.
- Synecdoche, New York began when Sony Pictures Classics approached Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze about making a horror film built around things they found frightening in real life rather than genre tropes, and the idea evolved into this drama.
- Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times named Synecdoche, New York the best film of the 2000s, and in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll four critics ranked it among the 10 greatest films of all time.
- The tiny canvases the character Adele paints are actually the miniaturized paintings of the artist Alex Kanevsky; Charlie Kaufman said her early studio work is small but visible, while by the time Caden reaches her gallery years later "you can't see them at all".
- When the movie premiered at Cannes the Great Recession hit and Sidney Kimmel Entertainment shut down, and Sony Pictures Classics picked the film up for distribution.
- At one point during production several crew members, including director Charlie Kaufman, got trapped in an elevator, which happens to be a phobia of Kaufman's.
