Philadelphia Weekly

From his out-of-nowhere 1999 smash Being John Malkovich to 2004's triumphant Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Charlie Kaufman has become a household name by melding absurdist farce with existential dread, fashioning depressing postmodern identity-crisis dilemmas into crowd-pleasing, hilarious hooks.

The gorgeous simplicity of a civilian population elbowing each other out of the way to spend 20 minutes inside John Malkovich's head and Sunshine's ex-lover brain-erasure operation both offer philosophical conundrums worth arguing about long after the credits have rolled. Kaufman's witty, prankish screenplays are typically cause for celebration--meaty deconstructionist essays.

I suppose the same might be said for Synecdoche, New York, an overstuffed meditation on life, art, rot, death and everything in between that marks Kaufman's directorial debut and a massive step up on the ambition ladder. Even compared to the cerebral jocularity of his previous efforts, this is tough stuff.

It is also, without a doubt, one of the most unpleasant, depressingly one-note experiences I've ever had in a movie theater. Since seeing the film last month, I've had some fascinatingly provocative and worthwhile discussions about everything that happens in Synecdoche. But I'd rather smash a beer bottle and slash my jugular with its shards than attempt to sit through it again.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, at his most nasal and resigned, stars as dramatist Caden Cotard, an unexpected celebrity after his Death of a Salesman revival with an underage cast earns raves from the local press in upstate New York. This terminally depressed man is soon presented with a MacArthur genius grant, which he unwisely uses to create a facsimile of his terminally depressed life on an elaborate NYC soundstage.

Cotard's goal is to create a "living theater," penning scenarios as fast as they can happen, reworking his pathetic life on the stage, until he finally loses track of himself entirely. It's a logical extension of Kaufman's great screenplay for Adaptation, self-defeatingly incorporating his own first-person neuroses into the assignment, offering some brilliant notions about the cannibalistic relationship between art and life.

Except Adaptation was funny.

Other Kaufman scripts hinge on plots or character relationships to propel the ideas forward, but Synecdoche is just an abstract idea: Cotard is so busy writing and rewriting, and casting and recasting that rehearsals stretch on for decades, and over the years the play becomes a self-contained universe.

Cotard misses out on his own life, dribbling it away in minutiae, his loved ones lost. Decades pass by in the span of a single cut, characters change faces and actors change roles. As surely as Cotard loses the plot, Kaufman loses the film, and Synecdoche, New York just drifts. Eight funerals later, everybody has died of old age and we can all finally go home.

There are obviously some savvy ideas at work here (even the title is a clever grammar-nerd spin on my mom's hometown of Schenectady). But in the past Kaufman's worked alongside slippery visual commercial artists like Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry. And even though he foolishly disowned the film, Kaufman's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and its asphyxiating, oppressive sex guilt found vibrant, cinematic expression through director George Clooney's blinding colors and low-tech optical illusions.

Synecdoche, in contrast, is relentlessly, crushingly drab. His first time at the helm Kaufman finds no visual corollary for the abstractions in his writing--everything's ground down in bleak, deliberately ugly literalism, with no variation in tone. Cotard's looking for blood in his stool, so we're treated to a nasty close-up of Hoffman prodding his feces with tweezers. The movie is so fascinated by the eventual breakdown of the human body that we've got one ghastly fetish shot of discomposure and disrepair after another, with no levity or wit to break the monotony.

I assume we're supposed to laugh because all these actors end up playing senior citizens, much like those ridiculed underage actors of Cotard's original Death of a Salesman production, but the joke doesn't stick. It's all too meta and deliberately wretched to leave much of a mark. Just like the movie.