3 Films:Synecdoche, Happy, The Right One

Charlie Kaufman, Mike Leigh, John Lindqvist

Synecdoche, New York, Happy-Go-Lucky, and Let The Right One In, are three original films that hail from three different filmmakers; from three different geographical regions of the world; and further, express three distinct emotional states: depression; bliss; and fear.

Synecdoche, New York

In the pursuit of happiness, we follow a portal into the Spotless Mind of Charlie Kaufman, delivered by way of his latest egocentric experiment Synecdoche, New York.

Mr. Kaufman transfers his marital discord from Being John Malkovich to Synecdoche, New York by way of a sexually ambivalent wife, and a narcissistic husband who happens to be a writer desperately sad and lonely, and forever longing to create something good, a la Charlie Kaufman from Adaptation.

Still more transference follows, laid out in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: love and lust as something washable, yet prone to staining; combined into a bloated, wheezing, shape-shifting parable about the futility of life and the unending search for completion.

Ultimately, Synecdoche, New York is far less powerful than the sum of its parts.

Happy-Go-Lucky

Happy-Go-Lucky is the antithesis of Synecdoche, New York. Where Caden's (Philip Seymour Hoffman) day-to-day in Synecdoche is a long, painful death march toward life's final credits; In Happy-Go-Lucky, Poppy (Sally Hawkins) refuses to succumb.

Where Charlie Kaufman has written a character that is depression personified, therefore intellectually stealth, Brit writer/director Mike Leigh presents a character in Poppy as a happy warrior, in constant motion against life's daily assault. Mike Leigh writes a smart, street-wise character, who simply refuses to let the world get her down.

Let the Right One In

When a Swedish film like Let The Right One In makes an unexpected splash worldwide, critics and writers search for, and document, each and every fingerprint that may link the film back to Ingmar Bergman and while there are superficial similarities between director Tomas Alfredson's style and that of the great master, Let The Right One In is essentially a monster movie, albeit a very well-crafted one.

And given the Bergman mystique surrounding all things bleak, credit must be given to writer John Ajvide Lindqvist for resisting the urge to make his little orphan vampire into a dour, depressed Goth child who constantly curses the day she was re-born.

She prefers instead an ethereal 12-going-on-200 lost girl, who through blood and empathy, helps deliver a picked-upon, pasty-white, pre-teen schoolboy from the cold, dark winter, and into the bright light of happiness.

Charlie Kaufman, like all students of cinema, surely studied the great works of Sweden's Ingmar Bergman, a director who made melancholy fashionable, and nihilism hip. The sad thing is, Bergman infused much of his work with very sharp, black humor; only most of us either overlooked it, or refused to acknowledge it.

Charlie Kaufman definitely acknowledges the need for humor, and the impact such a contrasting element can lend to the bleakest of scenarios, as found in all his previous works, but lost in Synecdoche.