Part dream, part puzzle, part brainteaser, the dazzling directorial debut from award-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman stars the inimitable Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theatre director who turns his every living moment into a play.
Hoffman plays Caden, whose problems include a failing marriage to Adele (Catherine Keener) and a career that is heading downhill fast. When Adele leaves him to pursue her own art career in Berlin, Caden throws himself into his new Broadway show. He creates a synecdoche of his life, in which a part stands for the whole. The film's narrative begins in Schenectady, New York, and the play between the two words is just one of countless lucid details that spring forth like sparks in this film.
As Caden attempts to fill his domestic void with dramatic recreations, he casts a lanky actor (Tom Noonan) as a near doppelgänger, a beautiful actress (Michelle Williams) as his wife and a quirky look-alike (Emily Watson) as his love interest, who in real life is an even quirkier box-office attendant named Hazel (Samantha Morton). As the players attempt to reproduce the goings-on in Caden's life at a 1:1 ratio, complications multiply. The real and the simulacrum start literally talking to one another, and Caden becomes both puppeteer and puppet on his own stage. view trailer
