It’s hard to recommend Synecdoche, New York, the newest film from Charlie Kaufman. Although I deeply admire Kaufman’s work, and, it should be said, I deeply admire this work, it’s not a kind of movie that leaves you with the sense of wanting to rush to the putative water cooler and go, Wow, you have to see this, as with, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Being John Malkovich. Rather, it’s the kind of movie that you, on one hand, (or least I) cannot help feeling as though you just endured Charlie Kaufman’s two-hour nightmare. For its nonlinearity, for its elisions, for its chronological shifts, for its tenuous but nonetheless sensible (sort of) logic, it has all the trappings of a dream/nightmare.

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