Leaning Towards Life

The Barbarian Invasions: A+

Synecdoche, New York: I

Roger Ebert died at the age of 70 in 2013. In the previous decade, he named Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008) as the finest film of the decade. With his trademarked two thumbs up, he announced to the world that death was better than life. But he noted The Barbarian Invasions (2003) as a four star picture, just like the Kaufman film. He didn’t deem the Invasions film worthy of being the best because he, at the end, did not prize life. He, in his book Life Itself and the documentary based on it, shows how life is precious, and true, and right and good. It just didn’t seem that way with his selection of Synecdoche as his choice for best movie of the aughts.

After a battle with cancer, and surgery that left him disfigured in his jaw area, Ebert claimed through a computer system like the late Stephen Hawking that he enjoyed this life nonetheless. Still, for a period that TIME magazine called the “decade from hell,” he didn’t have any problem with calling Kaufman’s effort the best of the ten years from 2000-2009.

Invasions is a far superior film which received four stars from Ebert like Synecdoche. While the latter is complex and seems to be unfolding in ways and collapsing on itself at the same time, Invasions takes the viewer on a ride of emotions and displays the interactions of intellectuals who discuss and take part in sex and wine and money like the blueprint for being an adult. It even features a morally upright (for the most part) businessman in Rémy’s (Rémy Girard) son Sébastian (Stéphane Rousseau). Though not perfect, it is one of the only films which depicts at least a semi-ethical entrepreneur. In Synecdoche, you get references to human excrement. While both movies play fast and loose with infidelity, Invasions makes the attempt to show how familial ties are closer sometimes than flings and affairs.

Without sentimentality, and with pure emotion, Invasions creates a world of cynics, and intellectuals, and airheads, and wisemen, and fools. The overall effect is the union of other people as individuals who care and love one another, even if they always don’t show it.

With Synecdoche, the idea is that life is not worth living. You’re born, you suffer and struggle, then you die. It has its moments of pleasure and pain, often the strife taking more room than the enjoyment. There are funny moments in Synecdoche. Small word puzzles and puns delight momentarily but the bitterness takes over the film. It runs too long and is a drag when it comes to contemplating the human condition and experience and leaves too much to wonder.

As evidenced in the film’s signature song “Little Person,” the work says that no one can be grand and see their dreams come true. This is ironic as the main character achieves career successes but ultimately fails as a human being.

Invasions only shows the failure in life not of life. As a character passes away, he is remembered for his achievements in his family and his professorship. It doesn’t matter that he had a strained and distant relationship with his children and that his students don’t show too much care in the fact that he leaves them in the hands of an attractive, younger professor.

In Synecdoche it is a dizzying display of mirroring effects of characters playing characters playing characters….The writing is intact and demonstrates the idiosyncratic mind of Kaufman.

The director of Invasions Denys Arcand, who made a slight tetralogy of the characters starting in 1986 with The Decline of the American Empire, and 2007 with Days of Darkness, and 2018’s The Fall of the American Empire may not have the filmic fireworks of Kaufman with excursions into the absurd and explorations of the inner conflicts of characters in colorful and confounding ways.

While both films are “talky” that serves each in the end. In an era of 9/11/2001 and the wars that followed it, the tragic presidential win for Barack Obama, and the Great Recession, and COVID-19, this gives the look back of these two films a completely new understanding of life, love, and loss. Though Ebert never got the chance to experience COVID-19, it would’ve been collected in the darkness of the other major events of the new millennium.

The meaning of Synecdoche is to toil away, maybe achieve, but still trudge sniffling and crying to the dying of the light.

Invasions advocates the raw and real sense of family and friends who pull together to send off their loved one with dignity and class. That’s amid chaos, of course. The film even gives examples of how horrific the healthcare system is in Canada and how even though broken, the American system is superior.

Kaufman’s film involves the usage of ugliness to attempt to pass off as beauty. There is a Marxist streak in the film that shows how there is only work among the class structures and that there is hope in the great equalizer that is death.

Kaufman gave a pouty speech about how executives don’t have the creative spark to fulfill the thoughts and ideas of “creatives.” He said that as a producer and executive of his own films. He was addressing the gatekeepers without whom there would be no Synecdoche or any of his other films.

Arcand is more reserved and doesn’t espouse his ideals in the same way. He lets his films speak for themselves. Synecdoche is just about the messy interaction of miserable people. The Invasion of the Barbarians is a gem of broadcasting the ways in which people clash and come together in the end.

That’s the key to what both filmmakers may have set out to do. While Kaufman is cerebral and insular from life in his film, Arcand displays a morality of life. It is a shining example of how the way to defeat the doldrums and horrors alike is to comprehend the fight against such negatives in this life. The ability to showcase the power of the mind as the source of emotion just as much as it is intelligence is shown with brilliance and verve.