Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut concerns a theater director named Caden Cotard who receives a MacArthur grant and promptly spends it constructing a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse, then a replica of the replica, until the whole enterprise collapses under the weight of its own sincerity. The film has been called a masterpiece and a self-indulgent slog, sometimes by the same people on different days. It has never been mistaken for a work of contemporary social instruction. Its obsessions are mortality, memory, and the slow failure of the body, subjects that predate the current cultural moment by several thousand years.

The cast is white and stays that way, and nobody involved appears to have given the matter a thought. Women populate the film generously, though nearly all of them arrive as projections of Caden's longing or dread. His wife leaves for Berlin, his daughter acquires a full-body tattoo, his lover lives in a house that is perpetually on fire. When Caden assumes the role of a housekeeper named Ellen, the gesture belongs to Jungian psychology, the man confronting his anima, not to any statement about gender. His ailments point toward Cotard delusion, Capgras delusion, and the auditory hallucinations of schizophrenia, and the film treats each as furniture in a haunted house. Nobody is affirmed. Everybody is dying.

There is a mild friction between art and money, since the grant funds the folly and the commercial world ignores it, but the film never builds that friction into an argument about systems. The weather is not a character. History does not intrude. Bodies here are sites of lesion and decay, which is the opposite of a celebration. The film does lecture, at length, about death and the impossibility of knowing another person, a form of sermonizing that nobody has yet filed a complaint about. It ends with a man being told to die by a voice in his ear. A serious picture, then, and almost entirely useless for our purposes.