Synecdoche, New York

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  • Opened October 24, 2008 
  • 2 hr 3 min
  • R | language and some sexual content/nudity

  • 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. Full synopsis

  • Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson
  • Director: Charlie Kaufman
  • Genres: Art House/Foreign

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100
Chicago Sun-Times
| Roger Ebert

I think you have to see Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York twice. I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film and that I had not mastered it. The second time because I needed to. The third time because I will want to. Read full review

88
Boston Globe
| Wesley Morris

I can't pretend to know fully what Charlie Kaufman is up to in Synecdoche, New York, with all the doubled characters, dreamy reenactments, comical minutiae, and personal unhappiness. But I got a great deal of pleasure out of watching him mount his fantasia about an artist suffering not simply for his art, but because of it. Read full review

80
NPR
| Bob Mondello

Synecdoche, New York is one heck of a head-trip. Read full review

70
The Hollywood Reporter
| Ray Bennett

Will mesmerize some and mystify others, while many will be bored silly. It's not a dream, Kaufman says, but it has a dreamlike quality, and those won over by its otherworldly jigsaw puzzle of duplicated characters, multiple environments and shifting time frames will dissect it endlessly. Read full review

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Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard and Samantha Morton as Hazel in "Synecdoche, New York."