Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Directed by Charlie Kaufman.
Starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Samantha Morton.

In a Nutshell: A director confronts his mortality while creating his own life on stage.

Here is a movie that almost begs not to be understood, and is as full of visual and narrative trippiness as one would expect from Charlie Kaufman (making his directorial debut). It is a film of great ambition, but also about ambition and how it brings us closer towards finding meaning (any meaning) in our short blip here on Earth. Phillip Seymour Hoffman stars as Caden Cotard, a theater director who uses the MacArthur genius grant to create his life’s masterpiece. He plans to transpose his entire life onto the stage, to celebrate and revel in the mundane of everyday life. Cotard expands production into a life-size model of New York with doppelgangers of Cotard and every meaningful person in his life.

During his production, Cotard tries to play God and crams his actors into the roles he believes their real-life partners play. Through his own double (a man who was studied him for 20 years), he becomes conscious of his own personality. As time wears on, his loved ones die and his city fades into a gray, abandoned void. To follow every plot thread and hallucination threatens to turn the viewing experience into an analytical one, rather than an emotional one. Hoffman’s Cotard remains the most accessible part of the movie. He fears growing old, he makes mistakes with his many love interests, laments losing touch with his daughter and uses this sprawling city-sized play as his path to creative fulfillment. This is a dense film, with no logical entry point to tackle its themes. But why discard this in favor of fast-food culture junk like Transformers? Synecdoche, New York embraces all the fears and neurosis that encompass our existence. If that doesn’t hold important to you, then I don’t know what will.