Charlie Kaufman and the Heart of Sarajevo

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Charlie Kaufman Sarajevo Film Festival
Sarajevo Film Festival

VERDICT: Kaufman's style could be deemed 'screwball,' could be deemed 'surreality,' and should probably be called 'Screw Reality'.

By William Bibbiani

Charlie Kaufman receives the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo at the 29th Sarajevo Film
Festival, saluting a career spent writing and directing films that defied convention, and
reclassified humor as a malignant form of sadness.

It’s tempting to say that, while there are a lot of talented screenwriters in the world, there is only one Charlie Kaufman. But that’s a lie, and it’s all Charlie Kaufman’s own fault.

In the famed writer/director’s screenplay for Adaptation, Kaufman invented for himself an
identical twin brother, Donald, who gives into all the formulaic, Hollywood screenwriting clichés that the rest of Kaufman’s work deliberately eschews. Yet somehow Kaufman’s films have found a large audience, not just critical acclaim. In a style that could be deemed “screwball,” could be deemed “surreality,” and should probably be called “Screw Reality,” his stories explode our preconceived notions of narrative structure and conventional logic. And yet they still satisfy his audience’s needs for emotional payoff and disarming whimsy.

There’s method in Kaufman’s madness, a deep understanding of all the rules he regularly
breaks. Kaufman’s films are challenging and cohesive treatises on modern existentialism, but
not — as they may sometimes appear at a glance — confessions of a dangerous mind. A sad
mind? Certainly. An insecure mind? Maybe. But dangerous? Probably not, unless you’re a
screenwriting professor whose whole curriculum is based on formula, and some kid in the back of your class keeps asking “But what about Synecdoche, New York?”

Charlie Kaufman got his start writing for National Lampoon in the early 1980s, but his
screenwriting career didn’t take off until a decade later, when he found himself contributing to
some of the weirdest shows on television. Chris Elliott’s legendarily off-kilter sitcom Get a Life
was a fitting home for Kaufman, as was the unfairly forgotten sketch comedy series The Edge,
where every episode began with the whole cast getting murdered. Alongside cult favorites like
The Dana Carvey Show and Ned and Stacey, Kaufman had an uncanny ability to attach himself
to doomed comedy shows, all of them too strange and, often, ahead of their time to find a
contemporary audience.

Yet Kaufman, to his credit, learned absolutely nothing about how to play to a crowd. His first
produced feature-length screenplay, Being John Malkovich, is defiantly esoteric. The story of a
failed puppeteer whose fruitless career forces him into a tedious day job, which unexpectedly
leads him into the brain of an esteemed character actor. The specifics are bizarre but really, any struggling artist trying to transform stifling humdrummity into pure inspiration can probably relate.

Kaufman’s storytelling gamble paid off. Directed by Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich was an
award-winning critical darling and somehow also managed to make money. He became a
Hollywood rarity, a writer whose inability to adhere to Robert McKee-esque screenwriting
principles was a selling point, not a demerit. He would write Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,
based on the outlandish autobiography of TV producer and game show host Chuck Barris, who
claimed to have moonlighted as an assassin for the U.S. government when he wasn’t gonging
talentless nobodies or tricking newlyweds into talking dirty. And somehow — compared to the
rest of Kaufman’s work — that deeply deluded elegy comes across as practically prosaic.

Few screenplays could ever claim to be as nakedly confessional as Adaptation. Kaufman,
tasked with writing an adaptation of Susan Orlean’s unadaptable best-seller The Orchid Thief,
found himself doing what so many writers do: agonizing, procrastinating, getting stuck inside his own head. In what history will no doubt declare one of the all-time great examples of turning a negative into a positive, Kaufman delivered not a screenplay adaptation but a screenplay about Kaufman’s total failure to write a screenplay adaptation. With his real self quagmired in doubt, his fictional identical twin Donald tries desperately to follow a pattern laid out by mainstream, audience-pleasing studio hackery. The result is a script credited to both Kaufmans, and Donald remains one of the few fictional human beings ever nominated for an Oscar.

While Kaufman’s films run a weird gamut of genres and styles — face it, almost everything
about them is unconventional — there’s a unifying streak of loneliness and self-incrimination.
Some writers think everybody is a hero in their own stories, but Kaufman’s heroes aren’t so
certain. They fight nobly against an oppressive world that tries to destroy them, yet they
themselves are the engines of their own destruction. Poor Caden Cotard of Synecdoche, New
York spends his whole life producing the world’s most ambitious work of dramatic theater, a
perfect encapsulation of human existence in its high-concept mundane profundity. It will never be completed, he will never be fulfilled. The two lovers at the heart of Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind are also forever doomed to an endless cycle. Then again maybe they get off easy. They keep obliterating each other’s memory, but at least they keep discovering each other first.

Kaufman’s screenplays have been brought to life by MTV generation wunderkinds like Spike
Jonze and Michel Gondry, and for years it seemed as though perhaps only a handful of
filmmakers understood the secret to unlocking the potential of Kaufman’s depressing, anti-
escapist tales of contemporary fantasy. But from Synecdoche, New York onward, Kaufman has been behind the camera as well. His stop-motion Anomalisa and live-action I’m Thinking of Ending Things form the second and third parts of a trilogy of self-centered loneliness, where personal expression is both beautiful and isolating, women are comforting and terrifying, and a pathetic death is perhaps the only plausible release. (And even that isn’t reliable.)

You could label Kaufman’s films as “dark comedies,” but even that’s misguided. Most dark
comedies subscribe to the idea that within the tragedy of life, there can be found comedy.
Kaufman’s films all argue something altogether different, and much less pleasant: that existence of comedy in our lives is, itself, the greatest tragedy of all. Comedy exposes the illogical, the unfair, the embarrassing. Kaufman’s comedy is not the catharsis. Kaufman’s comedy is the pain.

Beautiful pain.

 

The Film Verdict at Sarajevo Film Festival 2023.