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Imitation of Life

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman ("Being John Malkovich", "Adaptation", "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind") makes his directing debut with "Synecdoche, New York" (rhymes with Schenectady), the story of a self-involved artist who struggles to understand life, death and heartbreak.

Theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) mounts middling versions of classic plays in a Schenectady repertory theater. Days away from the opening of "Death of a Salesman", Caden is wracked with self-doubt. Things take a turn for the worse when his marriage — and his health — begin to deteriorate. As Caden is stricken with one freak illness after another, he struggles to connect with his wife, a painter named Adele (Catherine Keener).

When Adele leaves for Berlin with their 4-year old daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein), Caden sinks deeper and deeper into depression. He turns to his therapist, Madeleine Gravis (Hope Davis), for help, but she is more interested in selling him her latest self-help book than in giving him useful advice. Failing therapy, Caden turns to Hazel (Samantha Morton), the sweet, slightly daffy redhead who works the box office. But this encounter, initially, is also doomed to failure.

Unexpectedly (and inexplicably), Caden wins a MacArthur Fellowship — the "genius" grant. He vows to use the money to mount a work that is "real" and "honest". He moves to New York City and sets up shop in an abandoned warehouse. With his troupe, he slowly builds a living, breathing, simulacrum of New York inside the warehouse, with actors playing the parts of "real" people. Eventually, this includes choosing actors to play the part of himself and his new wife, an actress named Claire (Michelle Williams).

While Caden deals with an ever-increasing litany of horrific illnesses and confusion with his on-stage and off-stage life, he is consumed with worry over his daughter Olive, reportedly under the influence of Adele's flaky, possibly predatory friend, Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Falling deeper into melancholy, Caden begins to lose touch with reality while his work begins to take a life of its own.

From here, the film is twisted into a veritable Gordian knot of identity crises, time shifts and narrative tricks. Blessed with an ingenious imagination, Kaufman gilds "Synecdoche" with dozens of brilliant little cinematic gifts: A flower tattoo that wilts and dies; a perpetually burning house; Caden's elaborate illnesses. All these gifts are lovely to note, but, disappointingly, they are only window dressing. Unlike "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", Kaufman's clever conceits aren't driving the action — they merely ornament a story that is anything but clever or imaginative.

Take away all the clever Kaufmanesque touches and you're left with yet another story about a self-pitying artist, flitting from woman to woman, unable to connect with the people in his life because he is so self-involved. This is not new territory. In fact, Woody Allen strip-mined it long ago. (Even Woody got tired of the sound of his own whining.) Fellini also tackled this subject in "8 1/2", but with a kind of celebratory, perverse joy. Caden is so completely consumed with his own pain, there is no room for celebration, for love, even for understanding. Everything in his life serves to feed his own "tortured" soul, especially his relationships with women.

The greatest disappointment of "Synecdoche" is that despite creating nearly a dozen female characters and blessed with an assortment of the finest actresses working today, Kaufman would choose to view the women in Caden's life as perfunctorily as he does. Kaufman's female characters are each given only one or two notes to play, depending on how they figure into Caden's journey: the emasculator, the seductress, the girl next door, the authority figure, the ingenue and so on. It's exasperating to witness, for example, someone of Catherine Keener's talent relegated to yet another disappointed housewife role.

As Caden, Hoffman is the absolute embodiment of melancholy. He plays a man constantly teetering on the verge of tears. Adrift and profoundly lonely, he is too wrapped up in his own fears of failure and death to connect to the living. With Hazel, he pines for Adele. With Claire, he dreams of Hazel. He frets about Olive yet forgets his other daughter's name. After two-plus hours of self-involved moaning, one just wishes he'd get over it already - maybe buy a puppy. As one of his actors says, "no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own."

"Synecdoche, NY" is an ambitious undertaking for a first-time director, even for one as talented as Kaufman. While the film has its moments of clarity and whimsy, it suffers under the weight of too many ideas. Unfortunately, all of Kaufman's tricks can't make up for the film's relentless, self-indulgent melancholy.