I first saw this, the directorial debut of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation) a few months ago at the Toronto Film Festival. For me, it was one of the few must-sees of the event. I saw it again a few weeks ago at a local press screening. And I’ve been dreading writing about it ever since.

I liked it a lot, more the second time than the first, but for reasons that don’t lend themselves to a rational description that pretends, intentionally or not, to come from a stance of superior understanding of the movie. In Elvis Costello’s famous phrase, writing about a movie like this is like dancing about architecture. Some people are going to see it and be irritated at the fact that they don’t understand it. I’m not sure that if you pinned Kaufman down and demanded an explanation of every detail that he could provide them either. But it’s all of a piece, and endlessly intriguing as well as emotionally evocative. It seems to start out rationally enough as the experiences of playwright Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) as he mounts a production of Death of a Salesman in Schenectady. He is a hypochondriac who doesn’t recognize that his wife (Catherine Keener) is slipping out of his life. As his fears of failure and decay consume him, he is unexpectedly given a MacArthur “genius grant,” which he uses to stage a massive production about—what? It’s not clear to him, other than that it concerns his life and over a period of many years takes over his life, on a massive warehouse soundstage that becomes a world of its own. Any division between his real life and his attempt to make artistic sense of it become impossible to separate, to him as well as to us. But Synecdoche New York is not out simply to obfuscate or to confuse us. It moves fluidly from idea to idea and scene to scene, and if it is occasionally almost lachrymose it is just as often weirdly funny. It was photographed by Frederick Elmes, who did most of David Lynch’s movies, and while Kaufman isn’t that far off the deep end (the film is more pleasurable than, say, Inland Empire), he clearly wanted Elmes to achieve a dislocated mood. I hope to see it again and I’m sure I’ll enjoy it when I do, whether or not any deep-seated meaning is revealed to me.

—m. faust