Having written the offbeat hits Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Charlie Kaufman made his directorial debut with what remains his defining masterpiece, Synechdoche, NY.
The late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a brilliant but troubled theatre director who has to learn to cope on his own when his marriage disintegrates.
Embarking on a radically ambitious new play, he sets about building a life-size replica of New York inside a Manhattan warehouse, turning it into an increasingly complex artificial city, a work of living theatre. Blurring the boundaries between his real life and the artificial one he has created for himself, by the time he brings the curtain down on his magnum opus, Caden will have travelled to the outer reaches of existential calamity.
Thematically rich and structurally audacious, Synechdoche, NY features memorable turns from Hoffman, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener and Samantha Morton. A bleakly funny masterpiece of existential ennui, it remains the most ambitious of Kaufman’s legendarily boundary-pushing films.