Cast

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Hope Davis, Sadie Goldstein, Tom Noonan, Peter Friedman, Michelle Williams, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dianne Wiest, Emily Watson

awards

Austin Film Critics Association 2008 – best original screenplay, Independent Spirit Awards 2009 – best first feature, Robert Altman award

Film description

Synecdoche is defined as a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part, the special for the general or the general for the special, as in ten sail  for ten ships  or a Croesus  for a rich man.

Two years after its release, the directorial debut of Charlie Kaufman, one of the leading American screenwriters of the 21^st century, is finally on the big screen in Poland. The plot speeds like a subway train from the director’s personal theatre crisis, through a panorama of New York’s bohemians, to his attempts to create a work of total art, an imitation of life. Caden Cotard (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, amazing in his ability to transmit an entire range of emotions in a single glance) receives a scholarship for geniuses enabling him to produce his magnum opus. Caden locks himself and the troupe in a huge warehouse to create his own world. The sets are copies of real locations; the actors are doppelgangers, including impersonators of the director himself. Soon, the play spins out of control, compounded by the chaos in ‘real’ life: the director’s wife emigrates taking their daughter with her, an actress rejects his advances, and his psychoanalyst cares only about her career.

Just as in his previous scripts, Kaufman creates an all-encompassing metaphor. Clichés about all the world being a stage or a looking glass walking through an inn acquire new meaning and sense, with laughs to boot. A great film – multiple viewings required.

Jan Topolski