Synecdoche, New York **** (2008, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dianne Wiest) – Classic Movie Review 799

Philip Seymour Hoffman gives a tour-de-force as Caden Cotard, a terminally ill theatre director who struggles with his work and his women. Offered a grant, he decides to turn his life into art, and to put it all on stage, creating a life-size replica of part of New York inside a Manhattan theatre district warehouse and have actors playing himself and the people in his life.

Visionary writer-director Charlie Kaufman’s absolutely extraordinary 2008 movie – he won the 2005 Oscar for his Best Original Screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – is an imaginative and challenging, though possibly alienating, work of art. It’s incredibly ambitious and astonishingly clever but, dealing with scary raw honesty with matters of life and death, it’s wrist-slashingly depressing. The writing is brilliantly clever and the production and acting throughout are impeccable.

This is the kind of film you need to see more than once to understand it, but feel immediately after seeing it that you never want to experience it again. But then again, now Hoffman’s gone, it demands re-seeing. It’s high up among his finest work.

Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan and Dianne Wiest also star in the quality cast.