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The fifty-one-year-old screenwriter Charlie Kaufman is sui generis in a way that either stumps audiences or makes them want more. His movies-he's written five before his newest and most improbabable, Synecdoche, New York, including Being John Malkovich,Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-can get to you in the way that sitting through a great performance onstage can leave you sitting up straighter.  His comedies are at heart tragedies; yet like the best film writers, Kaufman understands how the head gives in ultimately to the heart in movies. If he were Russian, he might be Tarkovsky; if he were German, he could be Werner Herzog (without the loop-the-loopiness). His connection to writing for the movies is as much a cinematographer's search for images as a screenwriter's need for expression. If you read his published screenplays, they are flat-like reading about Gaudí's architecture rather than seeing it in person. Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman's first film as writer and director, is a kaleidoscopic comedy of more than two hundred images: twice the usual movie, but thenSynecdoche, New York tries to speed up a life without losing the person to piled-up memories.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a Schenectady, New York theater director, Caden Cotard, whose own life is in search of a final act. His neurotic artist wife, Adele (played by properly whiny Catherine Keener), loathes him; she tells their couples therapist she wishes he was dead (and she says so in Keener's sing-song-y monotone that drips boredom). Early on, Caden discovers medical issues: these will gradually overtake him, and Kaufman the director seems to enjoy the Halloween creepiness of making his actor feel punished simply for living. Adele leaves Caden, and takes their young daughter to Europe. Caden is left with unresolved feelings for a theater production more personal than restaging the classics, as well as for Hazel (Samantha Morton), a mousy assistant who responds to his longings because of her own sadness. When they begin a relationship, he visits her house, which inexplicably is on fire inside-an image out of David Lynch or Buñuel, but which Kaufman the writer knows he need not explain. How the two Charlie Kaufmans overlap for you will determine how you respond to the film; but not having all the answers is the movie's one answer. How much need-to-know do you need to know about a person's life?

 If the movie takes its own time setting forth its plot, it is not for lack of activity on the screen. As a member of the Hiccup Generation, the group of mostly-young for whom MTV speed-editing has become the norm (i.e., Spike Jonze, who directed Being John Malkovich, and Michel Gondry, who directed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), Kaufman's directorial eye is overstuffed; his editing sense is a hummingbird's: together, the material and the technology are stretching toward truths that, in the movies at least, are all but extinct. We don't go to the movies much any more because we care; the movies are a night's entertainment, like going out to a restaurant. In all of Charlie Kaufman's movies, in his own fabulist's way, he wants to slow us down (even by speeding things up). And damned if he does not succeed here: while the audience is busy trying to keep track of what is real and what might be a manifestation of Caden's inner troubles, the movie's title pun-synecdoche, refers to a part corresponding to a whole-develops into something deeper than a joke.

Once Caden receives a genius grant to carry on with his far-reaching theatrical concept, the conceit takes shape. Caden turns his own life inside-out, by using actors for him, Adele, Hazel, and his second wife, an actress, Claire (Michelle Williams). Over time-the movie does wonders with expressing the fluctuating mental aspect of time-he has an entire city built in an abandoned warehouse. The human mirrors (played by Tom Noonan and Emily Watson, among others) fuss over recreated incidents, such as arguments between Caden and one or another of his women. (Noonan's Caden argues with Caden over what he would do). As the multiplications continue, our empathy increases for Caden: he is the archetypal stand-in for the author whom we have seen in movies (Marcello Mastroianni for Fellini, Liv Ullmann for Bergman) and in the theater. But Kaufman goes one step further. One zip of a frame explains it all: a copy of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, open to the first page, announces Kaufman's belief that, under any name, the artist ultimately plays himself. In Proust's epic, Marcel remembers his entire life in a blink of an eye, though it takes him through some two thousand pages of details. And not until the end of the last volume does Marcel come to understand his life is his work and his work is his life. For Caden, the epiphany does not happen until the end of his life; for Charlie Kaufman, the finished film is his work about his life. When Caden says there are millions of people who act like extras, but "they're all the leads of their own stories," Kaufman, the writer, is channeling writers as far back as Shakespeare and as modern as - well, who's texting you now? 

 Synecdoche, New York opens Friday at the Tivoli Cinemas, in Westport Square, 4050 Pennsylvania. For information and tickets, go to www.tivolikc.com. 

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups. 

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