Movie Review: Lateness in Art and Life

A late review of Late Quartet (2012)

By Jonathan Price

This film foregrounds music in ways that are rarely done in American cinema, though it uses the focus to trace the elaboration of a 4-way intimacy. It’s a quartet, not a tercet, so it’s not the traditional romantic triangle, but there are three men in various involvements with a single woman, all of them playing classical music together for 25 years as a group designated “The Fugue.” This one woman is in various stages and types of love with the three men; however, we don’t see a great deal of bedroom antics onscreen – a brief fling by the married man with a much younger woman; a longer affair between the one offspring generated by the two married members of the quartet and its chief violinist. So the focus is primarily on relationships and music rather than bedroom acrobatics.

A trope for life and death

It's hard to give the ExtraOrdinary (EO) rating to a movie that continually reminds the viewer of the suffering of life and the finality of death, but impossible not to give it to Charlie Kaufman's utterly fascinating, gripping 2008 film, "Synecdoche, New York."
    It stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener, who played opposite Hoffman in "Capote." (Hoffman won the Oscar for his performance as Truman Capote in that film, and Keener portrayed Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. By the way, tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the murder of the Clutter family, the subject of Capote's nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood.)
    A trope is a word or expression used in a figurative sense, and a synecdoche is a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole. I like the nice ambiguity of the movie's title. Is Synecdoche a town in New York (like Poughkeepsie, New York), or does the title identify New York appositively as a synecdoche for the movie's subject (life and death, as I would say)?
    The movie ends abruptly with the Hoffman character's being given the stage direction, "Die," and the screen's turning white. I couldn't fail to notice the striking coincidence of watching this film (about which I knew nothing) on the day I'd posted "Unsettled question," focusing as that post does on the finality of death.
    Even a detailed plot summary can't convey the sense of this film. It has to be experienced.

Charlie Kaufman's film credits include "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004), "Adaptation" (2002), "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" (2002), and "Being John Malkovich" (1999). Also a film I haven't seen, "Human Nature" (2001).