Film review: Synecdoche, New York

Director: Charlie Kaufman
With: Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener
Released: May 15

Charlie Kaufman is one of the few screenwriters to have been awarded his own adjective. Ever since he bamboozled audiences with Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, the label "Kaufmanesque" has been slapped on any attempt at a philosophical, high-concept comedy with a dark tinge and a bizarre edge. Now, for the first time, Kaufman has made a film as both writer and director, and it's so mind-bogglingly Kaufmanesque that it makes his previous screenplays look like Richard Curtis rom-coms.

Beginning with its uncommercial title, Synecdoche, New York is a difficult film to get a handle on. It stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as a morose community theatre director, a man so prone to hypochondria that he subscribes to a magazine called Attending To Your Illness Quarterly. He's married to Catherine Keener, a painter whose canvases are no bigger than postage stamps, but he's drawn to Samantha Morton, a flirtatious box office attendant.

At first, we seem to be watching a relatively conventional midlife-crisis comedy: low key and deadpan, certainly, but nothing too far out of the ordinary. But then surrealism creeps in around the edges. Morton moves into a house that's permanently on fire; a four-year-old writes a best-selling novel about anti-Semitism. It's only then, about halfway through, that Kaufman introduces his central conceit. Hoffman is awarded a limitless grant to produce a new play, and decides to create an epic that will recreate his own life down to minute detail. Instead of staging it in a theatre, he has a replica of several city blocks built in a warehouse, and he casts hundreds of people to play everyone he knows. Years pass, the project spirals and proceedings get more hallucinatory from there.

What it signifies is a matter for debate, but in an early sequence Hoffman is seen directing Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, a play which had the working title "The Inside of His Head", so we can assume that we're seeing a fevered projection of his own anxieties. Synecdoche, New York came about when Kaufman was hired to write a horror film, and he realised that the things that horrified him weren't vampires or serial killers, but the prospect of loneliness, ill health and mortality. Beyond that... well, several viewings may be required to tease out hidden meanings. Luckily, there's enough dry comedy and dazzling imagination to make those viewings an enticing prospect.

Nicholas Barber