The directorial debut of acclaimed screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) is an overambitious meta-narrative about a director producing an overambitious meta-narrative. From the punny title to the bitter end, Synecdoche, New York is driven by its creator and main character's desperate attempts to address the grand themes -- art, love, life, and death. The one self-referential twist that Kaufman didn't intend: both the play-within-the-movie and the movie itself are disastrous failures.
Before it gracelessly collapses under the weight of its own ambition, Synecdoche, New York begins with one man's mysterious dissolution: Philip Seymour Hoffman, in one more shlubby, unappetizing performance, plays Caden Cotard, husband to painter Adele (Catherine Keener), father to four-year-old Olive (Sadie Goldstein), and director at a Schenectady community theater. Strange omens abound, and with a series of exponentially worsening symptoms, Caden's health and family slip away from him: he's pissing blood, his face breaks out in boils, and Adele insists that she'd rather not have him join her on a trip abroad.
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Caden seeks help from a patronizing therapist (Hope Davis) and solace in the arms of receptionist Hazel (Samantha Morton) but finds himself alone and unable to swallow. When he wins a MacArthur grant, Caden sets out to produce a massive self-referential play based on his own miserable life. This is the point where Synecdoche, New York disappears down a rabbit hole and never makes it back out again: surreal details metastasize, time accelerates dramatically.
Tom Noonan, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, and Michelle Williams appear to play doppelganger versions of other characters, and suddenly, everybody's wearing gray wigs and old-person make-up. Caden's daughter resurfaces, all grown up and tattooed, in a Berlin peepshow. There's sickness and suicide, regret and suffering, and finally, finally, Caden finds, at the Russian-doll center of the enormous stage that doubles as his life, death.
