Nobody wants to listen to other people’s misery - they have their own problems. This idea is visited repeatedly in Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York,” but he doesn’t heed his own pervading theme. Donning a guise similar to Coppola’s “Youth Without Youth” in which the director delves so deeply in his own bouts with existentialism and the meaning of life that all care about the viewer’s understanding is tossed aside, the film remains borderline unintelligible throughout – as it deals exactly with someone else’s psychosis. Synecdoche (sin-neck-doe-key), a trope for the city of Schenectady, where much of the movie takes place, unveils many interesting ideas and characters, but the purpose of the film is so rooted amongst ambitious creative chaos that few will understand its intentions.

Theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) quickly realizes the frailty of his own mortality and his desire to create something grand before he departs this world as an ever-surmounting mass of bad luck and depression closes in upon him. As he inches closer to determining how to present his newest play, a life-size replica of New York takes shape inside his theater warehouse and the lines of reality blur with the surreal elements of his declining condition.

Plenty of humor (especially in tripped-over dialogue and oddball supporting characters such as Hope Davis’ psychiatrist), wry conundrums, obsessions with love and accomplishment and reflections on death exist in the fascinatingly weird world Synecdoche brings to the big screen. It’s essentially exactly what you’d expect from Kaufman’s directorial debut, based on his own screenplay. As other actors are cast in the roles of real people in Caden’s life, confusion sets in with blurred lines between reality and his play; along with even more obscure definitions of time and narrative structure. There’s so much intricacy at work in the film to keep audiences transfixed – but these bits of interesting meditations on everything Kaufman finds relevant as an artist are the very things that may keep viewers away, especially when they’re unable to ride his eccentric wavelength.

Charlie Kaufman’s latest examination on life and death may very well make its audience reflect upon their own mortality and contemplate the importance of existence, but more likely because their minds will be wandering from a lack of coherence in the film playing onscreen. Hoffman portrays the withering artist with a sympathetic understanding while everyone else plays multiple versions of each of their characters in Kaufman-esque fashion; but the tumultuous confusion of encroaching death affects the screenplay in far too surrealistic a manner to please general audiences.

- The Massie Twins

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