ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies

CHARLIE KAUFMAN is the ingenious screenwriter responsible for twisted delights like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. His directorial debut Synecdoche, New York is no less imaginative, but is also a much more ambitious and elaborate attempt to match his trademark flights of fantasy with a more realistic drama on the unbearable fragility of human existence.

It is not a film that is easily digested and soon forgotten; instead it repays the patient viewer as it quietly steals a way into your heart.

Philip Seymour Hoffman gives a superb performance as New York theatre director Caden Cotard. He starts to become acutely aware of his own mortality and the ticking of time's clock whilst staging a production of Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman.

As his marriage and family life disintegrate, he devotes himself to his career. Winning a McArthur Grant allows him to concentrate on the creation of a play about New York that will stand as his artistic legacy.

It is a project that consumes decades of his life, assuming a momentum of its own as the sets mushroom into massive, life-size recreations of Manhattan and the cast grows to include multiple actors to play Caden and box-office assistant Hazel (Samantha Morton) who has become one of the most significant women in his life.

Ultimately, Synecdoche New York is all about one man's attempt to shape the chaos of his life into something meaningful and worthwhile. It is a moving account of love, loneliness, death, dejection and just about everything entailed in simply being human and passing a brief speck of time on planet Earth.

Selected nationwide release

Director: Charlie Kaufman
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Hope Davis, Emily Watson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dianne Wiest
Screenwriter: Charlie Kaufman
Certificate: 15
Running time: 126 mins
Country: US
Year: 2008

© Allan Hunter, 2009

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