5. Synecdoche, New York
Plot summary- Philip Seymour Hoffman is a theater director whose wife leaves him to make microscopic paintings in Berlin, whisking his daughter off with her. Hoffman gets a MacArthur Fellowship and builds a huge warehouse where he aims to stage his magnum opus, a life-imitating ultra-realist production. This goes on for about twenty years (I assume; near the end hes old as hell) and the production has grown larger than life, leaving everyone involved to question whats real and what isnt. Oh, and also, in his spare time Hoffman cleans his ex-wifes apartment and gets told what to do through an earpiece.
Why is it confusing? As I sit here with the DVD case for this film in front of me, I cant help but think that the designers watched ten minutes, thought wtf lol and resolved to just making things up. On the front a pink text-box screams The smash-hit comedy of the year! at me, while a dishonest blurb on the back tries to pass the film as some sort of hilarious tale about a bumbling Hugh Grant figure attempting to build a massive warehouse to keep his friends and pets in. Dont be fooled, because in reality Synecdoche is a self-questioning, ball-achingly confusing mind-f**k of a masterpiece. Charlie Kaufman is, objectively, one of the most original and exciting writers of recent decades and this film, in its own bewildering way, is no exception. A lot of its appeal is found in Philip Seymour Hoffman, who manages to cover up the fact that he probably didnt have a clue what he or anyone round him was doing during filming, by putting forward a typically brilliant performance. But Synechdoche is also worth watching purely for its expansiveness; this is filmmaking at its least linear and obvious. You have to really fight to get any enjoyment from it, and that can make it endlessly satisfying when you think youve finally figured out what one of the films many symbols and motifs mean In summary, the reality is that this is a movie about a synecdoche, a figure of speech in which a term for a part of something is used to refer to the whole of something; it was never going to be Taken 2.