"Typical Charlie Kaufman flick" seems a bit weird, no? In the end that's not a bad description of Synecdoche, New York. To say I'm missing half the subtext of this film is an understatement. It's depressing -- majorly so. It plays like a less funny funny, better-acted Adaptation. Kaufman seamlessly flutters in and out of imagination and reality, acting and not acting. From the outset, Caden's (Philip Seymour Hoffman) life is an epic downward spiral. Or at least seems to be, until you realize that half of what you've seen is simply his dream. Or... could be his dream? The film has lots of familiar commentary, about the banality and pain of life, delivered through rather unfamiliar stylistic devices. (Caden, after his wife and child leave him, devotes his life to assembling a play intended to be the summation of his own life and world.) Complimenting Hoffman is redundant, but Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, and Emily Watson are all great as well. In the end, for me, I feel like the movie has a scope beyond me, and that the whole is ultimately so much greater than the sum of its parts that I feel a disconnect. Like there are things I should be understanding, allegories I should be seeing, that I'm not. Kaufman's really a twisted fuck.
One thing I was thinking throughout much of the film is how well Philip Seymour Hoffman does in developing a character through subtle changes. For instance, compare his roles in Mission: Impossible III and Before The Devil Knows You're Dead. Magnolia and 25th Hour. Eerily similar characters on the facade, but very deep nuances that make them rich and real. (As an example of the opposite, look at Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code and Tom Hanks in Cast Away. Virtually the same character each time: Tom Hanks.)
