Kenneth Turan gives "Synecdoche, New York" a thumbs up: "Synecdoche, New York" is beautiful, and I don't just mean the title. A synecdoche, for those unversed in the poetic tropes, is a figure of speech by which a part stands in for the whole, or the whole stands in for a part, or the general stands in for the specific, or vice versa. It's a lilting play on the name of the town of Schenectady, N.Y., where the movie's hero, a melancholy regional theater director named Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), lives with his painter wife, Adele (Catherine Keener), and their 4-year-old daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein). It hints at the artistic and existential obsessions that come to stand in for the life of an unhappy artist who blankets his life with his work, struggles mightily to understand the first by way of the second, and loses an ability to distinguish between the two. And it makes an irrefutable case for the universality of the individual human experience.
Full review here at the LA Times
Synopsis Synecdoche, New York
Theater director Caden Cotard (Hoffman) is mounting a new play. His life catering to suburban blue-hairs at the local regional theater in Schenectady, New York is looking bleak. His wife Adele (Keener) has left him to pursue her painting in Berlin, taking their young daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein) with her. His therapist, Madeleine Gravis (Davis), is better at plugging her best-seller than she is at counseling him. A new relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel (Morton) has prematurely run aground. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one. Worried about the transience of his life, he leaves his home behind. He gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in New York City, hoping to create a work of brutal honesty. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a growing mockup of the city outside.
Opened October 24, 2008 Runtime:2 hr. 3 min. R language and some sexual content/nudity
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson
Director: Charlie Kaufman
Genres: Psychological Drama, Showbiz Drama, Drama
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