Results tagged “synecdoche”

Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut; the ambitious, surreal and expansive Synecdoche, New York, stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as a regional theater director who moves to NYC from Schenectady after his wife Adele (Catherine Keener) leaves him. Using money from a MacArthur fellowship, Caden rents a huge warehouse and spends the next decades directing a never-finished theatrical epic based on his life. Manohla Dargis at the Times loved it (ditto Gothamist): "It’s extravagantly conceptual but also tethered to the here and now, which is why, for all its flights of fancy, worlds within worlds and agonies upon agonies, it comes down hard for living in the world with real, breathing, embracing bodies pressed against other bodies." And here's our interview with Kaufman.

Don't feel bad about mangling the pronunciation of Charlie Kaufman's new film, Synecdoche, New York; page three of the press kit is solely dedicated to the title's pronunciation [Sih-NECK-doh-kee] and various meanings, such as "A Part is used for the Whole, as in The Screen for Movies." Though Kaufman wrote such gems as Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, this is his directorial debut, and he certainly picked an ambitious project to cut his teeth with. The haunting, surreal story spans almost the entire adult life of Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a regional theater director who moves to NYC from Schenectady after his wife Adele (Catherine Keener) leaves him.