Recent occasion to reconsider the by far most thought-provoking, sometimes infuriating and (it must be said) sublime movie I've ever seen, has put me in a tizzy to complete (for now) my recollections of it. (As everyone knows my enjoyment of a thing is incomplete until expressed.) So:

I found "Synecdoche, New York" to be a lyrical, thought-provoking, gorgeous rumination on nothing less than the very nature of life itself, all its ugliness and intolerable beauty, seeming meaninglessness that gets transmuted into ultimate meaningfulness thanks to the unextinguishable, irrational, salmon-against-the-tide-type animal sheer force of human will, and especially the wild strangeness and extremity of subjectivity (which I for one take so much for granted in my daily coming and going - the movie stopped me in my tracks, put me in grateful, humbled, incredulous awe, especially as a believer- why would God *do* that? It's staggering).

It provoked the interesting thought, which I'd never before had, that all humor might be black humor at its heart. (Taking human mortality as a constant, how can it not be?) It suggests that much we consider entertainingly ironic, actually could not be less funny, in the face of the insane improbability and fragility of existence. (Signal example: the early scene in which Adele waffles about buying the house.)

It examines the peculiarity and possible futility of the creative impulse (which deserves many more words than I have time for right now), there's a quiet Mozart/Salieri thread throughout that does not take sides but does seem to goose the contemporary viewer for its lazy willingness to confuse creativity and psychosis.

I consider it a stunningly successful and generously fearless exploration of the fear, desire and identity concerns behind the question "No matter what they do or say, do we ever *truly* know how anyone else feels about us?", and the exhilarating, frankly terrifying answer, "Hell no, but love and believe them anyway!" (The only other movie I've seen that does that as well as this one does - or at all - is the Australian film PROOF, which I also love.)
Like snowboarding, the first days of which you spend being delightfully surprised by the unlimitedness of your ability to invent new ways to fall down and break every part of your body that you'd really rather keep intact, the movie keeps pouncing on your heart and *wrecking* it, then strolling casually away, only to return and do it again in some new awful way. It's easily the most brutal entertainment I remember ever experiencing (with the possible exception of a production of Titus Andronicus which, with apologies to Dave Barry, I will never forget as long as live as I happened to have just eaten a meatball sandwich at the time. OK not really, but there are only so many stringy bloodsoaked decapitated heads I want to see in one evening). You can't stand it; you want to leave. But life sometimes sucks, and the movie can't or won't lie.

Speaking of which - I can't begin to get into its surrealist mode and the importance of that choice to the movie's effectiveness - its contribution to both the movie's occasional opaqueness (when do we ever really fully understand anything IRL?) and, yet, somehow, with a palpable active perversity, its hyperrealism (which gives the emotions it evokes a dire, organic authenticity - there was not one I had that felt jerked out of me). I would like to say much more about that at some point, but for now: it reminded me again and again of Magritte's effects - the same at-once dreamy/overalert, serene/disturbing, unreal/hyperreal tensions - just see my last para here for my brief thoughts at the time.

Like the most interesting art of any kind, it sometimes confused, irritated and challenged me, and yet despite that (or maybe in part because of that), it moved and thrilled me. I still think about it often.