A story of unfulfilled dreams, unforgiven pasts, and the unrecognized present, Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York could almost be called a modern day re-envisioning of Arthur Miller's classic Death of a Salesman. Both told in the shadow of impending death and amid the tragic struggle to make something of a life before that day arrives, they are haunting tragedies of lives lived in vain. But where Miller brought to life Willy Loman's despair through only real-life events, fairly coherent flashbacks, and barely delusional fantasies, in the hands of Kaufman, the tragedy that becomes the life of Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) reaches so deep into the inner thoughts and delusions of despair that Synecdoche, New York actually begins to feel like a horror story.

From the moment Caden Cotard steps on screen, his life is one that seems defined by impending doom. When his alarm goes off on the first day of fall, a voice reads from Rainer Maria Rilke's "Autumn Day": "Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing." Everywhere Caden turns are warnings about death and advertisements for ways to avoid or at least postpone it. While shaving, his sink explodes in his face, delivering his first of many injuries/maladies to follow. And when he goes to work to prepare for the opening of the play which he is currently directing, the scene on the schedule is none other than Willy Loman's death.

As Caden sees it, death and doom are at his doorstep and he must do everything he can to right his life before they arrive. "I don't know what's wrong we me and I want to do something important while I'm still here," he tells his psychiatrist (Hope Davis). After his artist wife Adele (Catherine Keener) leaves with their daughter Olive and he is awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant, he decides to make something of his life by building a gigantic model of New York, filling it with a cast of hundreds, and staging a theater piece depicting life and humanity as they really are. And so begins the truly bizarre depiction of Caden's struggle to find meaning in his own life, to understand the meaning of life in general, and to simply figure out who Caden Cotard actually is.

Jumping back and forth in time and between Caden's theater piece and his real life, the story of Caden's life quickly becomes a confusing jumble of that which is and that which might be. On his stages, he brings his own days to life again as if trying to figure out what they mean, what went wrong, and what might possibly still be able to go right. As his reality filled with strange diseases, bizarre connections, doomed relationships, and perpetually burning houses becomes almost too strange to be believable, one can't help but wonder if any of the life we see Caden leading is real at all. And as his reality and his theater piece become more and more intertwined with each passing day, whether one is more in his mind and whether one is more real no longer seems to really matter.

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