It's hard to watch idiosyncratic filmmaker Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" without thinking a superb watchmaker has gone mad, taking the viewer on a tour of the inner workings of one of Dali's clocks.
"Oh, God almighty," said Hope Davis when asked to describe the film, in which she stars with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener and Samantha Morton. "The basic story is about an artist trying to fulfill his true purpose, to say something of importance. It's also about negotiating the world, feeling like everything's falling apart. And the house is literally on fire. But I think it's really about the artist's journey, ultimately, and how torturous it is."
That artist, Caden Cotard, is played through stages of increasing decrepitude by Hoffman, who also appeared as Davis' radical, wayward boyfriend in the romantic comedy "Next Stop Wonderland" (1998). Here it's she who does the torturing as Cotard's almost psychotically self-promoting therapist, and she enjoyed it thoroughly.
"After he dumped me so unceremoniously on the street," she said, laughing about their "Wonderland" entanglement, "yeah, it was fun to really mess with his mind. It was a small part, but I couldn't pass it up. I just thought it was a strange and hilarious character, an utter narcissist thinking only about herself and what she might say next that might interest her."
The therapist, Madeleine Gravis ("Just a letter or two from 'gravitas,' " Davis notes archly), wasn't directly based on anyone but was originally conceived -- visually, anyway -- as resembling conservative commentator Laura Schlessinger.
"There was some very funny stuff that didn't get into the film about Madeleine's radio show and how she just tears people to shreds," Davis said by phone from her New York home. "It's that same model of the Judge Judys and everybody else who just can't get enough of themselves. It's really about their glorification."
But while the viewer might find Gravis' advice less than therapeutic, the character sees it differently (and is obviously right, the viewer obviously wrong and foolish for doubting): "I am trying to help him through the morass he has made of his life," said the actress, channeling the character. "He desperately needs to see a shrink, obviously, and I'm one of the best out there, so my book jackets quote me as saying."
