Meta Madness

Synecdoche, New York


Most filmmakers play God with just one imaginary world. In Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman takes things a step further: The screenwriter turned director acts as puppet master to a control freak choreographing his own alternate reality. Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a theater director who’s on a professional high. Only, his wife (Catherine Keener) just left him, and Cotard can’t decide whether he wants to be with a theater worker (Samantha Morton) or his lead actress (Michelle Williams). To dull the pain, he mounts a mammoth production based on his life in progress, with actors playing every part, including himself. Soon, doppelgängers get their own doubles, and art imitates life imitates art ad infinitum.

The brain behind such modern classics as Being John Malko­vich (1999) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Kaufman has made a name for himself by rooting around other people’s heads. For his directorial debut, he has decided to conduct an unofficial tour of his own noggin. Look past all the meta-­references and Mensa-level wordplay (the title is both a literary term and a goof on the city of Schenectady), and what’s left is Kaufman’s examination of what happens when an existence devoted to creative endeavors becomes eclipsed by them.

You also get the sense that his avatar Cotard—played with Hoffman’s usual fearlessness—represents the director’s own neurotic obsessiveness. The replica of Cotard’s New York that the character reconstructs in a downtown Manhattan warehouse (and sub-warehouses) looks like a film set, and the demons he’s exorcising in Kaufman’s name feel personal. Not everything works—a perpetually burning house, funny once, is groan-worthy by the gag’s 50th appearance—but this messy portrait of an artist as a self-loathing creep will stick with you long after you’ve figured out how to pronounce the title.

If there are any autobiographical elements to Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno (1.5 stars), however, we sure don’t want to know about them. Zack (Seth ­Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) are two minimum-wage sad sacks who are terminally broke; so naturally, they find a logical solution: directing their own hardcore skin flick. If your idea of hilarity is to listen to people come up with porn-title variations on Apocalypse Now and Lawrence of Arabia, then you may find Smith’s juvenile display of vulgarity absolutely gut-busting. For the rest of us, however, this foulmouth auteur’s latest is simply proof that you actually can make a painfully unfunny movie starring Seth Rogen. We’ll put it to you this way: There’s a scene in which a character has a load of excrement dumped onto his face; we know exactly how he feels.