When a film has as wonderfully eloquent and skillful a writer as the New York Times' Manohla Dargis labelling her own written reaction in the opening lines of a review of it as "pathetic" and contemplating that she "might as well pack it in now", then what hope is there for a non-professional reviewer in tackling it? I had grave reservations about doing an entry here containing my thoughts on Synecdoche, New York, but for very different reasons; unsure whether to do my usual kind of review, limit it to a paragraph in a round-up, skip it completely or simply cut and paste the whole of Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes (which should give you more than a hint as to my reaction to it). Like Ms Dargis though I will attempt it and I fear that if her enthusiastically positive review of it had me skipping paragraphs to get to the end (which I simply *never* normally do with her whether I agree with her sentiments or not as the writing always keeps me hooked) then the uncompromisingly negative one I'm embarking on now will probably have the literally *tens* of people who read this () doing the same. Enough with the pre-amble though, on with it .

Over the last decade Charlie Kaufman has become one of the most original and interesting screenwriters working in world cinema. His scripts are high on intelligence, quirk and invention and have made him to the writing profession what Christopher Doyle is to cinematographers: a name as big as the directors and an integral part of how the public view the creative input into the "authorship" of the films he is involved in. Ron Harwood writes damn fine scripts but nobody goes to the cinema to see a Ron Harwood film. Charlie Kaufman, for better or worse, is a whole other animal and a major selling point so it seemed a natural progression for him to eventually direct one of his scripts and give us a real "Charlie Kaufman film".

That film is Synecdoche, New York, which premiered at the Cannes film festival last year before bombing at the box office in a haze of atrocious distribution and mixed reviews. There's no coincidence that the best films made from Kaufman screenplays in the past were directed by men whose backgrounds were in music videos. If nothing else Kaufman is someone who creates scripts heavily reliant on "ideas", and it takes men with the visual flair and imagination to match those qualities in his writing to create a happy balance in the medium of film. Kaufman the director though sadly lacks what Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze do and his no-nonsence, understated style belie his abilities on the page and don't serve the material as well as other approaches have done before. This is not to say though that his script for this film is in the same class as the likes of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation. and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and it is far more grand in scale and ambitious in scope thematically, but his slow, ponderous visual style merely takes the portentious aspects of the film and renders them stilted and overstuffed (and the film as a result dull and turgid).

Phil Hoffman perhaps searching for the point of it all

Given his reputation as a screenwriter and the anticipation for his directorial debut Kaufman was able to assemble a ridiculously talented ensemble cast to work with. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a local theatre director who, following his artist wife leaving him, receives a "genius grant" and uses it to spend the rest of his life working on a theatre project on a massive scale, never fit for audience consumption as it is a replica of his life which keeps on gestating before impacting on and taking over his actual life. The women in film are a who's who of contemporary American independent cinema (in Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis, Emily Watson and Jennifer Jason Leigh) but like Hoffman's central performance it all recalls something like Savage Grace: the cast all do what's required of them but what they're being asked to do is part and parcel of the problem and as a result no matter how good they are or not, they cannot elevate the material.

The film is a mess, deliberately surreal throughout yet always jarringly so, there's no sense of time and characterisation is unbelievably sketchy outside of Hoffman's Caden, which makes the relationships throughout beyond questionable. This is a major problem because Kaufman has baulked at the idea that he's being weird for the hell of it, declaring that any weirdness in the film is there to create an emotional resonance, yet if the characters and relationships are so thin then that is probably why the weirdness feels tacked on as there's nothing to get emotionally involved in so he defeats the purpose. A contributing factor to this is the underlying misogyny rampant throughout the film, after Keener leaves him the women in his life are characterless shells who all morph into each other and are there to give him a conveyerbelt of women to "fuck". There have always been suspicious hints at this in his previous films (Adaptation. has Nic Cage's version of Charlie sexualising *every* female character and in Eternal Sunshine... the worst thing Kaufman has Winslet say about Carrey is that he's boring whereas the unbalanced retort is that "her sex is unmotivated" ) but having him horrified, watching his daughter having become of all things a stripper is emblematic of the distasteful undercurrent running through the film and actively prevents the emotional resonance he claims to be striving for from taking hold.

What is left then is a very ambitious effort (which is by no means a bad thing), but it fails on multiple levels. It drags, it is overlong, the acting is fine but doesn't make the film any more watchable and cannot fill in the blanks in the characterisation (or lack thereof) from the screenplay. There are lots of ideas thrown around and Kaufman actively refrains from explaining things because he wants the audience to get whatever they get out of it. This would be fine if he didn't throw in surreal aspects or ideas (amongst others that Hoffman may be dead) fleetingly, not expand on them at all and have no intention of ever answering the question. That makes the film a monumental conceit and quite literally pretentious as it takes these huge themes about life and death and everything inbetween but then shows this in a simultaneously sombre tone but with emptily flippant presentation that it is a claim of great importance, which in this case is certainly unwarranted. To label it "disappointing" would be an understatement greater than any of the considerable flaws in this almost unwatchable film, which does nothing but highlight that on this occasion Emperor Kaufman might well be naked after all, and it's far from a pretty sight.