SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

Starts Wednesday, November 26th

"No film with an ambition this large, and achievement this impressive, can be anything but exhilarating. A miracle movie." - Richard Corliss, TIME MAGAZINE

"One of the most insanely imaginative, shockingly ambitious, and ultimately brilliant films of this or any year! It is the work of a visionary! - Scott Feinberg, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation) makes his directorial debut with this clever, moving and highly unusual comedy starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Hope Davis, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, Tom Noonan, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Michelle Williams.
Theater director Caden Cotard (Hoffman) is mounting a new play. Fresh off of a successful production of Death of a Salesman, he has traded in the suburban blue-hairs and regional theater of Schenectady for the cultured audiences and bright footlights of Broadway. Armed with a MacArthur grant and determined to create a piece of brutal realism and honesty, something into which he can put his whole self, he gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in Manhattan's theater district. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a small mockup of the city outside. As the city inside the warehouse grows, Caden's own life veers wildly off the tracks.
The shadow of his ex-wife Adele (Catherine Keener), a celebrated painter who left him years ago for Germany's art scene, sneers at him from every corner. Somewhere in Berlin, his daughter Olive is growing up under the questionable guidance of Adele's friend, Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh). He's helplessly driving his marriage to actress Claire (Michelle Williams) into the ground. Sammy Barnathan (Tom Noonan), the actor Caden has hired to play himself within the play, is a bit too perfect for the part, and is making it difficult for Caden to revive his relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel (Samantha Morton). Meanwhile, his therapist, Madeline Gravis (Hope Davis), is better at plugging her best-seller than she is at counseling him. And to top it all off, a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one.
As the years rapidly pass, Caden buries himself deeper into his masterpiece. Populating the cast and crew with doppelgangers, he steadily blurs the line between the world of the play and that of his own deteriorating reality. As he pushes the limits of his relationships, both personally and professionally, a change in creative direction arrives in the form of Millicent Weems (Diane Wiest), a celebrated theater actress who may offer Caden the break he needs

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