Like all Charlie Kaufman scripts, Synecdoche, New York is a mind trip. If Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind seemed very off the wall to you, Synecdoche, which Kaufman also directs, will take you to an entirely new dimension of strangeness. And I say all of that with the greatest appreciation for what Kaufman has brought us.

Briefly, the story is that Caden Cotard, a stage director in Schenectady, is a bit obsessive with disease and death. After his artist wife leaves with their daughter, he receives a MacArthur grant that allows him to begin work on a play that will tell the story of his life. He rents a warehouse to put on the play. In it there are actors playing the roles of people in his life, but soon the actors become people in his life, so they, too, must have actors playing them. The play goes on and develops year after year. It is never ready to put on, because it continues to change and grow.

With this set up, we can soon become a bit confused. Eventually, the actors we recognize may be playing someone else. For example, Emily Watson's character in the film is Hazel, who is in love with Caden. In time, as Hazel's character ages, she is played by another actor, but Watson now plays an actor playing Hazel. The warehouse where the play is being done has another warehouse inside it where what happens in the first warehouse is being done as play. That second warehouse has yet another warehouse. This is more than a play within a play. It is a play within itself squared. It may seem strange, but it can be quite fun just trying to keep track of who is who in what world.

But the film is more than just an entertaining mind trip. It is a serious examination of mortality, fate, the meaning of life, and possibly even how God is present in the world. "Synecdoche" is not merely a mispronunciation of Schenectady; it is a figure of speech by which a part is used to refer to the whole (such as calling employees "hands") or vice versa (such as "the law" referring to the police). In Caden's play, the whole and the parts are so related that you can't really differentiate one from the other. His life is being boiled down to this play, and the play becomes his life.

Actually, the play is Caden's search for the meaning of his life. Is that meaning to be found in the parts—the various relationships he has made, the details of his life? Is the meaning more related to the whole? Do you need to see the entire play to understand it? At times he goes from scene to scene correcting the actors as he watches what is essentially his life. In time, be begins to give the actors notes about what they are to do. Here the hand of fate (or the hand of the Creator) comes into the story. Each actor is no longer acting out what has happened, but as director (and so Creator) Caden leads them into unknown events—into something more like real life.

Eventually, the play becomes its own world—a world with its own population, its own relationships. The roles become not just roles but whole people. At his mother's funeral, Caden comments "There are thirteen million people in the world and none of them is an extra. They all are leads in their own story." When the funeral happens in the play, the minister has a wonderful soliloquy branching out from there. It is this sense of being a lead in one's own story that may be the very core of how we should understand the meaning of life.

The author of Ecclesiastes cried out "Vanity of vanities! All is vanity." The word translated as "vanity" really means "mist." It means that nothing is permanent. Everything disappears. The cry could well be translated "All is illusion" or "All is futile." I think that writer would smile in understanding as he watched Synecdoche, New York. His own search for meaning took his whole life as well. When he was done, his understanding was that the meaning of life was to enjoy life. Or as Charlie Kaufman might tell us, the meaning of life is to play the lead in our own story.