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It’s a mystery

Kaufman’s 'Synecdoche, New York' is a film difficult to follow - or like

Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" turns out to be just as off-putting and as baffling as its title.

It's the long, labored story of Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a director of regional theater whom we meet as he's about to lose his restless, painter wife (Catherine Keener).

At couples therapy, she confesses that she fantasizes about his death, and when she goes to Europe for a two-week exhibition, it turns into a year and a divorce, leaving a bereft Cotard to mope in Schenectady.

Given Kaufman's terrific track record - he's penned such knotty, ambitious and enjoyable movies as "Being John Malkovich," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "Adaptation" - you'd expect him to find something darkly funny and ultimately moving in Caden's situation.

Kaufman has made a specialty of constructing time-splintering, reality-bending mousetraps that pay off with an unexpected emotional wallop. Here, though, all we get is the mousetrap.

And while I don't know what a synecdoche is, I think Caden might well be a synecdoche-bag. The more we get to know him, the less we like him, even as played by Hoffman, a great actor who specializes in finding the humanity in difficult characters.

When his family falls apart, a shell-shocked Caden is stricken with hypochondria and self-pity, ruining potential rebound relationships with a theater employee (Samantha Morton) and his favorite actress (Michelle Williams).

A chance for redemption seems to arrive when he's awarded a genius grant. Caden uses the proceeds to mount the most ambitious theater piece in history. This is one of Kaufman's grand, absurdist conceits - the autobiographical play is staged in an enormous airplane hangar, the cast comprises nearly all of New York, and rehearsals take 20 years. Caden fills the play with actors playing replicas of people in his life, and as they become part of his life, we get replicas of the replicas.

As the head-spinning narrative mounts, we lose our ability to make actual or emotional sense of it. For example: We see Caden weep when his father dies, but in the ensuing scene, grief is twisted into a macabre joke. We're told that cancer so ravaged his father's body that his tiny coffin had to be stuffed with cotton balls to keep his wasted frame from rattling around.

Are you laughing yet?

Kaufman's track record has earned our trust, but even a trusted writer-director can only pull a stunt like that so many times before you feel like a chump for investing in the story.

He does hit a few grace notes late in the movie. By then, however, I was looking for the rug beneath my feet. *

Produced by Anthony Bregman, Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, Sidney Kimmel; written and directed by Charlie Kaufman; distributed by Sony Pictures Classics.