Synecdoche, New York
By Marshall Fine
Who's in it: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton
What's it about: A theater director turns his whole life into a massive theatrical production.
Huh?: Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman ("Being John Malkovich"), this confusing movie starts with promise - but after 20 minutes, it disappears down a rabbit hole. The director (Hoffman), whose wife (Catherine Keener) has dumped him, moves from Schenectady, NY, to Manhattan and builds a miniature version of New York indoors - then populates it with actors playing all the people in his life. His life turns into his work - but the movie stops making sense almost immediately. Kaufman wants it to be a mind-tickling hall of mirrors but instead he creates the movie equivalent of the ear-splitting feedback you get when you put a microphone too close to a loudspeaker. Oscar-winner Hoffman ages ungracefully as he wanders through this numbing story, surrounded by a huge cast, virtually all of whom are wasted.
Long story short: You don't even want to try making sense of this mess.
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