What if you wanted to make a play of your life, but one straight narrative line, one set of actors, one stage – just won’t cut it?  If life is a multitude of perspectives, how do you capture it all, make sense of it, and also, live your life properly?  These are all the grandiose questions making up the labyrinth that is Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York.  Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a beyond-frustrated playright whose life seems to be crumbling around him, until he gets a genius grant and the chance to make a bold piece of theater. His wife Adele, a talented artist who specializes in teeny-weeny oil paintings (metaphor, anyone?) leaves him after realizing she’d rather live a happier, freer life, and takes their sprite of a daughter with them.   In the meantime, Caden’s play has morphed from being on one stage, with one set of actors, reenacting the highs and lows of his life, to a hive of scenes, hundreds upon hundreds of actors living out their lives and ambitions deep in the background, until the play becomes a city on its own, and other actors begin to live his life for him as he gets sicker and closer to death.  While choreographing this behemoth, he wrestles with mistresses/muses (Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, Samantha Morton – always brilliant), occasionally trying to reconnect with his wife and child in Germany, and always seeking some kind of emotional catharsis. Sounds fun, huh!  Everyone has gone on and on about how moody James Bond is in Quantum of Solace, but as usual, the real displays of existential angst can only be found in the arthouse, people.

But seriously folks, this is one flawed, bleak, absurd, post-post modern mindfuck!  Brave romantic nonsense. Kaufman makes movies like dense novels…but also writes jokes about the color of one’s poo and imagines a surreal running gag about a woman who lives in a house that is constantly on fire.  What madmen gave him money to make this? (answer: multi-national madmen).  The fact that a movie like this even got made shows there are gaps in the sad mediocre wall that exists around Hollywood, and weird, audacious stuff can still slip through.  Seriously.  Terry Gilliam, don’t give up!

Recommended for: Super pretentious people who love to laugh at art world and theater jokes, fans of all the other Kaufman films, no matter how flawed and twisted.

Not Recommended for: Migraine sufferers.