Ben Barna
September 18, 2008
"I have a lot of problems." And so begins the trailer to Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman's eagerly anticipated brain-squelcher of a movie. Those six words sum up all of Kaufman's protagonists, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman's destitute theater director appears no different. The film sees him re-create the mundanities of life in an emptied-out hangar, including a life-size replica of New York City. The magnetic Catherine Keener plays his ex-wife who left him for the German art scene, and Michelle Williams is an actress he marries. The trailer only hints at Kaufman's trademark confounding self-reflexivity, and uncanniness, but it's those ominous bleeps that make up the last seven seconds or so of this thing that really give me the creeps (in a good way).

