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Synecdoche, New York

Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman (USA)

Charlie Kaufman's disappointing directorial debut takes its name from a kind of metaphor in which a part represents a whole, such as describing Kaufman as the “hand” behind such ingenious scripts as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

In his screenplays, Kaufman has milked a lot of humour from the excesses of authorial indulgence, but this time he goes overboard. Like Adaptation, Synecdoche is the story of a man caught in the agonies of creation, his troubled relationships with women (Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams) and his confusion between reality and fantasy. A promising first half-hour sets up the death-and-illness-obsessed lead character, Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a theatre director in upstate New York, and his relationship with his four-year-old daughter and emotionally distant wife, Adele (Keener), an artist who paints what look like miniature Francis Bacon portraits. Between visiting doctors to deal with his increasingly alarming series of ailments, Caden wins a MacArthur genius grant, allowing him to go to New York and create his masterpiece: A vast multiyear project, with no discernible audience or end in sight, in which characters re-enact each others' lives in a constructed city within a theatre. As Caden goes through the decades and off the rails, so does the movie, in a series of bizarrely contrived dilemmas, punctuated by Caden's mournful monologues. Finally, he ends up as an old man stumbling through a ruined city. There's a name for this kind of metaphor as well: It's called a cliché.