TRAILER: ‘Synecdoche, New York’

I’d followed this movie since the early rumor mill, but it had since sort off slipped of my radar.

But now we’ve got a first look at Charlie “Eternal Sunshine” Kaufman’s magnum opus “Synecdoche, New York,” and it seems that we’ve either got a masterpiece or a glorious mess with this movie. Either way, it’s certainly one of the most distinct movie premises in recent memory. Since … well since Kaufman’s last movie.

It stars the inevitably great Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theater director whose autonomic functions are shutting down one by one. He decides he needs to do something “great” in his life, so he buys an old, massive warehouse and begins his masterpiece. Using a life-size replica of New York, he casts thousands of actors in a celebration of life as it’s truly lived, in all its wonderous dread and ennui.

In addtion to Hoffman, the cast is teeming with some of the best actresses currently working: Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, Jennifer Jason Leigh.

I don’t know how this thing’s all going to turn out, either Hoffman’s play or Kaufman’s movie. But the overwhelming ambition of both projects would suggest that we’re in for something  pretty special here.

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