2008 (Charlie Kaufman) 14A, 124 min
Starring: Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton

For fans of the complex narrative structures that Charlie Kaufman created in his screenplays for Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), his screenplay—and directorial debut—for Synecdoche, New York (2008) is a treat of word play, rhetorical devices, psychological probing and, of course, the creation of a reality too fantastic to be real that collapses in on itself. Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as Caden Cotard, a neurotic theatre director whose body begins to manifest his mental ailments. Catherine Keener serves brilliantly as his narcissistic and talented painter wife, Adele Lack, who grinningly confesses that she fantasizes about him dying. Together with daughter Olive, a precocious tyke who excretes neon (though her parents remain unfazed), they are a vivid contrast to the prim community of Schenectady, New York. After receiving a generous grant, Cotard abandons directing other people's work in favour of producing something of his own, something real. He decides to replicate his own life in theatrical form, constructing a replica of Schenectady in a Manhattan warehouse and hiring actors to portray the people in his life. As art imitates life, life begins to imitate art, and which part stands in for which whole is difficult to understand. Synecdoche, New York is as amusing as it is bemusing, but, as Peter Travers of Rolling Stone notes, "It's that rare bird in our debased pop culture that gives you something to chew on when you leave the theater besides where to go for dinner."