Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Domestic Box-Office Total

Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton, Hope Davis, Emily Watson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan, Sadie Goldstein, Josh Pais, Daniel London, Lynn Cohen, Deirdre O'Connell, Dianne Wiest
Director: Charlie Kaufman
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
Genre: Drama
Rating: R (For language and some sexual content/nudity.)
Release Date: October 24, 2008 (Limited)
Official Site: http://www.synecdocheny.com/
Soundtrack: Buy it from Amazon.com

SYNOPSIS:

Theater director Caden Cotard (Hoffman) is mounting a new play. His life catering to suburban blue-hairs at the local regional theater in Schenectady, New York is looking bleak. His wife Adele (Keener) has left him to pursue her painting in Berlin, taking their young daughter Olive (Goldstein) with her. His therapist, Madeleine Gravis (Davis), is better at plugging her best-seller than she is at counseling him. A new relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel (Morton) has prematurely run aground. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one.

Worried about the transience of his life, he leaves his home behind. He gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in New York City, hoping to create a work of brutal honesty. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a growing mockup of the city outside. The years rapidly fold into each other, and Caden buries himself deeper into his masterpiece, but the textured tangle of real and theatrical relationships blurs the line between the world of the play and that of Caden's own deteriorating reality.

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