Sreenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who spun American cinema on its head with striking scripts for "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," goes for fiendishly obsessional, intellectual acrobatics in his directorial debut.
"Synecdoche, New York" is monumentally ambitious — so crammed with literary innuendo and references galore the distributors would be well-advised to distribute CliffsNotes at the door, or have a semantics professor at a lectern coaching us on the finer points in Kaufman's dense, lexicograhical narrative.
Going against the major idiot-proofing current of American filmmaking, Kaufman begins with the assumption that the audience will be as smart, observational and freakishly, gluttonously informed on just about every subject under the sun as he is. We're supposed to get for example, the reference to Cotard's Syndrome (a psychiatric disorder that compels a person to believe he or she is dead, or bleeding out their internal organs) when a character is dipping into the pages of "Swann's Way" (the first volume in the "In Search of Lost Time" series) by Marcel Proust.