The “best film” of the 2000s and why Roger Ebert would watch it forever
Roger Ebert watched a shit-tonne of movies during his time as America’s most popular film critic, never shying away from a harsh written obliteration of a popular hit if he felt it necessary. Sometimes he was pretty brutal.
Yet, Ebert equally never refused to make bold declarations of love when he discovered a movie that left him feeling full of awe. All it takes is reading one of Ebert’s glowing reviews of a movie he considers a favourite to have your faith restored just a little bit. He encapsulates that feeling of discovering a movie that you like so much, that reflects such a feat of filmmaking, that nothing else really matters.
One of these he proudly called the “best film of the decade,” which is a confident assumption to make, but he was steadfast in his decision to crown this divisive epic the greatest achievement of the 2000s – he was referring to Synecdoche, New York, the Philip Seymour Hoffman vehicle that has famously confused many viewers since it was released in 2008, but can you be that surprised, though, when Charlie Kaufman was at the helm?
The 2000s were full of great movies that Ebert might have picked as the best of the decade – No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Amélie, Y Tu Mama Tambien, City of God, Mulholland Drive. The list is endless. But Synecdoche, New York stands out as his favourite, with the critic writing, “It intends no less than to evoke the strategies we use to live our lives.”
Like many viewers, Ebert was initially left a little puzzled by the film when he first watched it, but he soon learned to embrace that feeling, to really sit with it, and use it to inform a second watch. And then another. “After beginning my first viewing in confusion, I began to glimpse its purpose and by the end was eager to see it again, then once again, and I am not finished,” he said.
The movie is one of identity, with Hoffman playing a theatre director who becomes increasingly wrapped up in the creation of a production which comes to directly affect his own mental state. Like many of the best films out there – from Persona to Mulholland Drive – Kaufman explores the ever-complex nature of the inner workings of our psyches, doubling, and that confusing blur between reality and fiction. What and who is real? What is simply a product of imagination? How can we ever be sure?
“Charlie Kaufman understands how I live my life, and I suppose his own, and I suspect most of us. Faced with the bewildering demands of time, space, emotion, morality, lust, greed, hope, dreams, dreads and faiths, we build compartments in our minds. It is a way of seeming sane,” Ebert explained in his review of the movie.
He compared Kaufman – who’d previously penned surreal works like Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Adaptation – to “a novelist who wants to get it all into the first book in case he never publishes another.” As his first endeavour as a director, Ebert was impressed by Kaufman’s ambition, suggesting that those who “felt the film was disorganised or incoherent might benefit from seeing it again.”
A staunch supporter of Kaufman’s bold approach to exploring life and identity, topics we often find too intimidating to attack with as much scope, Ebert is adamant that Synecdoche, New York is a proper masterpiece. That’s if you can understand it.
