A note is struck in Synecdoche, New York - perhaps the one that commences Jon Brion and Deanna Storey’s smoky-’n’-sad after-hours ballad “Little Person,” which closes writer/director Charlie Kaufman’s latest dive into the gaping, unforgiving maw of existence. The tone, always in a morose minor key, remains unvaried for a good two hours until Brion and Storey grant the proceedings (over a blessed fade-to-white) some retrospective resonance. Not to say that the previous 120 minutes of poseur artistry (begetting 4 minutes of genuine invention) is improved so much as given a finish (an elating flourish) it doesn’t deserve. Para-referencing Herzog’s Stroszek, the music does the heavy lifting though the headless chickens dance.

And a good many headless chickens there are (personal favorite amidst the detritus: Jennifer Jason Leigh as a corruptive, German-accented lesbian), all filtered through the decidedly blighted perspective of Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in unrelenting misery mode), a Schenectady, New York-based playwright whose emotional and physical desolation knows no bounds. His horrors are grounded at first - a depressed painter wife (Catherine Keener), a 4-year-old daughter (Sadie Goldstein) subtly torn in her loyalties - though the film’s fixation on blood as motif (gushing from head, hidden in stool) hints at a soon-to-be unhinged reality.

The too-tight high-heels on Caden’s robotically condescending therapist (Hope Davis) - red-flecked bruises making for a perverse contrast with her crimson-sin nail polish - are the film’s fail-safe signpost. Beyond that, abandon all hope ye who enter Kaufman’s sub-Borgesian labyrinth. A Purgatory of inexplicably flaming domiciles, warehouses within warehouses, and rampant person-to-person doubling (Hoffman becomes Tom Noonan/Dianne Wiest; Samantha Samantha> Morton, most wittily, becomes Emily Watson), this unconscious-made-conscious is predicated on its own futile infinities - for both Caden and Kaufman, failure is the be-all-(never)end-all requirement for success.

Bullshit, say I. The tell, as Ricky Jay might have it, sees Caden presiding over a sea of index-sized cue cards for the performers in his “synecdoche,” all of them officious single-line prompts (abortions and miscarriages, relationship flameouts, job loss) that presume suffering as the lone real-world emoticon that moves the human beast to despair. Give me an artist who shows how things joyous are as much an incitement to anguish, who explores how our varied feelings, successes, experiences, and failures feed off of and inform each other, and I’ll show you a true talent of their respective form (e.g. Mike Leigh and his recent Happy-Go-Lucky).

Kaufman’s constant games-playing, on the other hand, is now well past the point of diminished returns. His work increasingly pales as time passes - what remains in memory of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation., Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are the clever conceits that either good actors (Malkovich, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Keener, et al) or better directors than Kaufman (Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry) give some semblance of import in the moment. That it’s all half-assed smoke-’n’-mirrors has hardly mattered until now - Kaufman’s cunning, along with his atypical status as a celebrity screenwriter, has been enough to grant him a pass. But Synecdoche, New York is his confessional, his nail-in-the-coffin admission that the comic-miserabilist vein he’s been mining (one, now proven, that has seldom been deeply felt: herein, only an image of Caden screaming through thumb-’n’-cum stained glass at his older, now-stripper daughter - Robin Weigert - feels like it springs from a smug-free Interzone) has entirely run dry.

In the introduction to his 1998 survey of the American sound film (“You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet”), critic Andrew Sarris notes of his years-in-development tome that “one can never finish; one can only stop.” The sentiment, I think, applies equally to filmmakers, especially to those, like Kaufman, with delusions of abortive grandeur:

Stop, Charlie. Stop.

UGO Rating

Writing: D+

Direction: D+

Performances: C

Visual Appeal: C-

Overall: D+

Vitals

Release Date: October 24th, 2008 (limited)

Studio: Sony Pictures Classics

Director: Charlie Kaufman

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Tom Noonan, Michelle Williams, Sadie Goldstein, Samantha Morton, Jerry Adler, Lynn Cohen, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Robin Weigert, and Dianne Wiest

Genre: Drama/Comedy

MPAA Rating: R