Synecdoche, New York

Synecdoche, New York (2008) is about a theatre director. Caden Cotard wins a large grant and decides to make something true: he builds a full scale replica of New York inside a warehouse and stages his own life in it. Then he builds a replica of the warehouse inside the warehouse. Years pass, the play never opens, and the actors acquire actors who play them. It is Charlie Kaufman's first film as director, after writing Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. How it began is unexpected. Sony Pictures Classics approached Kaufman and Spike Jonze about making a horror film built on real life fears. Jonze was to direct and chose Where the Wild Things Are instead, so Kaufman took the chair himself. This film came out of a commission for a horror picture. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden, alongside Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson, Hope Davis and Dianne Wiest. It cost 20 million dollars and took only 4.5 million at the box office. Roger Ebert wrote that it concerns nothing less than human life and how it works, and in 2009 he named it the best film of the decade. It runs 124 minutes. Good for: formally difficult films, work about ageing and death, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Less good for: the plot dissolves as it goes and the jumps in time are never explained. The bleakness does not let up. Part of the critical response found it self indulgent, and that reading is defensible.