Synecdoche, New York
Directed by Charlie Kaufman
(R)
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Latest Videos FromThe Week
**
A neurotic playwright tries to create a replica of his life.
Synecdoche “strives to be a work of greatness,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.com, but the effort shows. Charlie Kaufman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter behind Adaptation and Being John Malkovich, makes his directorial debut. Yet he “can’t get away from being the little man inside working the gears” and let the actors carry the show. The film introduces us to a theater director (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who embarks on a monumental production: To build a replica of his life, line by line, actor by actor, until fact and fiction blurs. As always, Kaufman aims for the poetic and profound, but too often his film congratulates itself for being “so technically elaborate and emotionally ambitious.” Kaufman freely plays with time, space, and narrative, said Todd McCarthy in Variety. But his “structural trickery” makes it difficult to sort out his big themes of “life-versus-art, life-as-art, or art-instead-of-life.” Kaufman has crammed “enough poetry for several great movies” into Synecdoche, said David Edelstein in New York. As puzzling as it can be, best just to “go with the free-associational flow” of it all.
