Tortured Movies for Tortured Types: Synedoche, New York

Given the conventionality of Hollywood, it doesn't take much to be different. But it takes real talent to find that balance between skewered originality and universal storytelling. Since "Being John Malkovich", Charlie Kaufman has made this niche very much his own. "Synecdoche, New York" further consolidates this position with .

The film opens with Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) looking at his pasty reflection as a child sings. Cotard is a director at a local theater. His current production of "Death of a Salesman" has received rave reviews, but success doesn't come so easily.

Cotard's wife Adele (Catherine Keener) is more interested in her own work. She admits to their therapist that she fantasized about Cotard dying. On his opening night, she stays at home to complete a series of miniature paintings for an exhibition in Berlin, an exhibition she asks Cotard not to attend. On top his marriage crumbling is the physical deterioration he suffers. His skin breaks out in a rash. He starts to walk with a limp.

In all of this, the one way out his Hazel (Samantha Morton), the cashier at the local theater. She is direct in a way Cotard hopes to be in the theatre. Even when she takes him to bed, he cannot get out of himself enough to make love to her. The theatre is his one true way to engage with truth. When he wins a MacArthur Fellowship, he is provided with the financial means to pursue his vision.

The fellowship is more a curse than a blessing. Cotard's ambition to create a work of unwavering honesty leads to a play which balloons to encompass his whole life. Once it reaches the limits, it turns back in on itself. Year after year, the story turns tighter and tighter on itself as more actors are recruited to play the people in Cotard's life. Cotard soon finds himself in a labyrinth of his own creation and the walls are fast closing in.

Such a film would fall apart if it weren't for Kaufman's sense for the whimsical, such as Hazel's perpetually burning house, and his ability to create compelling if not entirely likable characters to populate his unique cinematic worlds. Even at the end, when Cotard tires of being himself and swaps roles with a female actor,  Millicent Weems (Diane Weis), we don't entirely lose interest in him. We still hope for him to find some way out as Weems whipsers commands to him through an ear piece. Even if Cotard has written himself off as just another character, Kaufman has us rooting, however vainly, for Cotard's real self. Inexplicably, the cast and crew, who have become almost indistinct die. Weems directs Cotard through his corpse strewn stage, his life almost over, his magnum opus never seen.

As always, the Kaufman script has attracted some of the best character actors working in cinema. Morton is utterly beguiling as the confused and tremulous Hazel. Emily Watson is mesmirising as Hazel's theatrical doppleganger, Tammy. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Diane Weiss both put in powerful if regrettably short performances.

Synecdoche, apart from bringing an obscure linguistic term into greater parlance, is a cautionary tale for all us introspective types whom seek to subject the world to our tangled interiors. Art which is too true to life has the danger of consuming both.