Well—somewhere further than a talking cat. Paw-Paw is the “X” on the couple’s calendar; if she can last out a month-long waiting period, they can adopt her. She is their only commitment, the event that will decide their fates forever and usher in the next stage of their lives; she is their only anchor in the rising tide of time, and the only object with which they can take its measure. Luckily for them, they can’t hear her talk—that onus is on us. (As she rasped on the voiceover, like an Ewok blues singer, I realized how much we take Bill Murray as Garfield for granted.) One can almost smell the stale ramen noodles in the walls of their flat. A self-conscious deadpan, favoring deadness over panning, is the order of the day—though the passivity is pointed. Jason and Sophie live in a static environment that recalls early Jim Jarmusch or Kevin Smith, with their underachieving heroes; but this is slackerdom gone sour, lived in unhappily, and past 30. And I think it may be crucial to note the difference in time (now) and place (L.A.), and, if gendered assumptions are your thing, the presence of a female sensibility.

In her profile of July—published, quite punctually, in July—Katrina Onstad elegantly sums up the resistance to the director’s work: “Twee fascinations with childhood innocence can mask an unwillingness to tackle life’s darker quandaries.” And the flaccid-faced boys in Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)—July’s first and previous film—do indeed seem to be submerged in masks; their stares are inexpressively sad and unaccountably burdened. Fifteen is rather early in life to rediscover one’s innocence, but a boy that age has life lessons to learn from an even younger girl. Yet contrast this mawkishness with the subplot involving his eight-year-old brother. After seducing a woman in an anonymous chat room by inviting her to “poop back and forth” with him, they meet in person, on a park bench. After the music swells, he pecks her on the cheek and scurries off. What seems at first to be a light-hearted curveball becomes a profoundly sad moment; the woman is more alone than ever, her innocence and “corruption” inexorably linked. Could it be that July’s twee fascinations mask a latent willingness?

Getting back to The Future, it’s conceivable that some feathers may be ruffled not by her inability to deal with darkness, but rather her determination to treat it lightly. This isn’t some heroic attitude; I think it’s more a reaction against, or an acknowledgement of, entrapment. Homemade YouTube hits stand in here for our cultural obsession with youth, the promise of magically catching on, of being “self-made”; and the sidereal balm of L.A. leaves such dreams on life-support. (Sophie, who’s like Sally Bowles without the verve or talent, would’ve been trampled by New York long before she turned 35.) What is going on here, I believe, is far more specific than a midlife crisis—it isn’t a phase for her but a flatline. Echoes of the recession and its consequences seep into our minds like acid, even if the movie itself abjures or evades or is simply oblivious to them; and this avoidance adds to its tragic dimensions. It points to what may be the most vexing, and yet essential, quality that July has as a filmmaker: her introversion—or disengagement. It is common to equate her Etsy-Betsy style with Wes Anderson or her other contemporaries, but I think the Miranda July figure is more analogous with Woody Allen. They both play frustrated artists, sure—albeit different types. But the most damning evidence comes from characterization: They litter their screenplays with their own clones. The characters that don’t have July’s consciousness, like the divorced entrepreneur Marshall (David Warshofsky), aren’t fully rounded or convincing; and those that do, like Jason, have rather icky propinquities: Linklater looks like the Raggedy Andy to Sophie’s Raggedy Ann, more a brother than a lover. I didn’t want to see them stay together; yet his casting italicizes her solipsistic despair.

Since July is her own star, the fault really is in her. Despite comporting herself like the ostrich ballerinas in Fantasia, July is a fragile sort of beauty; but, paradoxical as it sounds, she looks too much like she acts. In both of her movies, she’s seduced a creepy-looking divorcé with an aggressively awkward pick-up strategy—and scored! Is she supposed to have “game” or are they just lonely? She does not seem to notice that her characters’ darlingness may be off-putting to some, indeed many, people who live outside of her demimonde. But no matter how bent her universe, or how replete it is with precious kibble for hipster chihuahuas, its creator is capable of poetic feeling worthy of Kore-eda or Lynch. Warshofsky, whose chest protrudes as his hair recedes, sports some louche bling; he howls out one line reading like a coyote in heat, and, in so doing, channels Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet or Lost Highway’s Robert Blake. Conversely, an old tee-shirt—Sophie’s safety blanket—pursues her with the doggedness of a lost pup. It swells up around her like a banana-colored womb, and her limber frame folds into it as if she were origami. Is Sophie ensnared or in ecstasy? Doing a pas de deux? Or possibly a combination of all three? Earlier in the movie, she hypothesized that a blue-haired neighbor lady, who sits by the window alone, as if tabulating the time it takes for the wallpaper to dry, was the Caesarean type-A who’d “seize the day”; the shirt says “c’est la nuit”—it’s the night. The discrepancy between those two statements comes close to describing the ethos.

With the moon unable to help him—able only to light his way—Jason ambles to the Pacific, through the city he’s put to sleep. The name of this ocean has never been more apt. Like a conductor before an orchestra, he brings to crescendo the frozen waves; they heave and ho like lungs expelling seawater, and they return to life much to the one-time sandman’s relief. Jason was in search of lost time, and now he’s faced and found it; but time is only as substantial as the wind. If you feel it, it’s already gone. He blows through menial jobs like Sophie; they’ve outlived their youth and the comfort of dreams. Time keeps on going—but where? Perhaps it spools with our faults. July’s poetry doesn’t translate to relief because she knows that the weight of nothingness can be very heavy to bear.

Although this is the latest model in the dude-this-blows-my-mind-pass-me-the-joint mold, and it’s meant to whirl like a dervish in the viewers’ brains, enticing ’em to scamper back to the theater to reverse engineer its backed-up cranial plumbing, I didn’t find it too hard to follow—and that’s a compliment. Nolan fluidly hopscotches from one nightmare to the next, dragging his mottled dream team in tow. DiCaprio heads up this rather esoteric bunch. For high-income clients, he and his gangly assistant, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, will climb over the mental membranes of unsuspecting schmucks, and purloin secrets from their subconscious. Is this legal? Is this common? Does John Q. Public know that his dreams are no longer private? You might need to rock Nolan’s dream boat to get any concrete answers. Perhaps the closest we get to a clue comes when Cobb (DiCaprio) recruits Ellen Page to be an “architect” of mental states after her predecessor is vanished—presumably tortured to death by a Japanese bigwig named Saito (Ken Watanabe). (Her job is to design the topography of the dreams that Cobb dips into, and I’m sure someone will draw a soggy parallel between it and to film direction.) Under Michael Caine’s tutelage—he makes hardly a cameo, unfortch—she seems to have learned the basics of Cobb’s trade; but she’s about as aware of the specifics as the Ivy Leaguers were of the C.I.A. when they were harvested to staff its first generation.

Saito’s brain is the first we see hacked; but whatever they retrieved from it must not have been too vital to his conglomerate—he becomes Cobb’s next client. The plan now is not the usual retrieval, but “inception”: planting an idea in subconscious soil. Apparently, though, this is risky business; ideas metastasize like cancers, and eventually wrack the whole brain—for all intents and purposes, warping the victim’s personality. Their mark is a preppy named Fischer (Cillian Murphy, posed in stock photos like a Ralph Lauren model); he’s the inheritor of his cold-fish father’s business empire, and rival industrialist Saito wants to see that kingdom as divided as Lear’s. (Cobb & Co. are like trust-busting privateers, even if Nolan doesn’t frame them that way.) Over the course of an international flight, they break into the yuppie’s soul, and face off not only with an army of superegotistical white blood cells, but also Cobb’s own demon—his late enchantress of a wife is down there waiting for him.

It’s also down there that Nolan gets to show off his kickass blockbusting skills. He ups the ante, widening the ambit of slumberland to dreams within dreams—and that only accounts for the goings-on in Fischer’s noggin. Cobb caroms through the synapses on his own guilt trip, with Page accompanying him, acting as an in-house analyst. In the world above, we’ve already bounced between continents. (It’s an open secret of good summertime moviemaking that one should dazzle the audience with exotic locales, titillating their inner tourist—particularly at a time when real tourism budgets are strapped.) The world below isn’t quite what it could be, though. We get a rainy day in New York (?), a five-star hotel, and what looks to be the ninja bivouac from Batman Begins situated on the ice planet Hoth. There’s also the decomposing remains of a comatose limbo that Cobb once cohabited with his wife (Marion Cotillard)—don’t ask me who their real-estate agent was—which is finely imagined, if curiously. Of why they’d choose to build a Mies van der Rohe nightmare for themselves, with a skyline of identical obelisks, I have no idea. I heard some guy bitching about Inception on one of the entertainment-industry channels, and he compared it to Mulholland Drive. In truth, Nolan’s dreamworlds have nothing on David Lynch’s intuitive dreamscapes, or the feeling one gets even from Lynch’s lesser movies; but this is a thriller first and foremost, and, considering that, some of his visuals—M. C. Escher stairwells, Gordon-Levitt curb-stomping through zero-G hallways, and cities folding on themselves like board games going back into the box—are very impressive.

But even if Hans Zimmer’s obdurate soundtrack is usually little more than a foghorn blast (aside from the eerie bars reserved for Cobb’s foreign-accented wife, the chatelaine of his withering fantasy); and even if the linchpin of the connubial subplot hasn’t even the logic of a Lynchpin; and even if the roles assigned to the ladies (the savior and the bitch) may give pause to some feminists—that isn’t what I want to take issue with. There’s an icky insensitivity in much of Nolan’s work—and it may be more deeply unconscious than anything in this movie. I like many of his films; they’re a cut above your average multi-million-dollar brand-name spectacle. (That is, if you’re able to plug your ears to, or titter heartily at, his transparently aspirational dialogue.) His reputation is predicated on his predilection for themes like justice or obsession or guilt; but they are interlarded rather than immanent: They stick out of the narrative like keys on a map. This sort of obviousness is easy to overrate—but even that is a minor flaw. Inception is very much Freudian slippery—and this bothers me, at least, because so much is slid away.

For instance, Watanabe (the saving grace of Letters from Iwo Jima) is perfectly cast; the dignity and weight he brings to his role sweeps under the rug not only the fact that he’s a bushido cliché, but also the notion that Watanabe’s honor is yin to the yang of Saito’s obfuscated deviousness. Sure, it’s his goons who dispose of Page’s predecessor, but aren’t they just following his orders? It’s standard-issue for a Nolan film—ever-lauded for so-called moral complexity—that Cobb’s crew is utterly unconcerned about their fallen comrade; they just move on. It’s a little insulting that we aren’t expected to care, either. Nolan is shockingly cuddly with corruption. When Cobb agrees to take on Saito’s assignment, it’s in exchange for a pardon; we know he’s been falsely accused of murdering his wife, but a warrant’s still out for his arrest in the States. All it’ll take for him to get off the hook is one measly phone call to the authorities from Saito, who’s also been instrumental in duping Fischer—he bought out the airline that the victim is flying on, and all of its flight crew, to boot. I’ll never trust a stewardess again. To the director, these actions seem like nothing more than cogs in his plot machine; to me, they’re rather fishy.

And then there’s the matter of the whole procedure, which is the crux of the film. It’s no wonder that the details surrounding it are left so high up in the air that they seem almost designed to flit away from all but the most skeptical viewers. Cobb’s men are supposedly the good guys, but they’re basically rapists-for-hire. So much fuss is made about Cobb coming to terms with the truth about his wife; but poor Fischer is given a false resolution to his daddy issues, and it seems to be played off as a token of the team’s benevolence. So what if it tarnishes the reputation of a family friend (Tom Berenger) that Fischer’s been turned against? There’s a lot of collateral damage in slumberland. Murphy is a fine actor, and he gives an affecting performance—broken down from years of lilting in old pappy’s shadow—for which Nolan has reserved some of the better dialogue. But Fischer’s given short shrift—and Nolan’s all sunshine and rainbows about that. We’re not meant to step back and look at the global significance of this little mind game. Saito wants the Fischer empire to downsize to prevent it from becoming a monopoly—so selfless of him, truly. Clap. Clap. Nolan must be a blessed innocent to take this industrialist at his word, and not even question whether Saito merely intends to do some empire-building of his own. But, of course he wouldn’t! He’s a decent enough fella because he’s committed to unshackling Cobb, right? Right…?

As much as I enjoyed this movie, I’d never trust Nolan with my stock portfolio—and certainly not my kids. I just can’t buy into all this puffery about Inception being “ingenious” or “transporting” or anything like my idea of a “dream movie.” And it’s a gazillion degrees away from being an “intellectual overload”—unless you’re prone to headaches. (A mess like Synecdoche, New York may have been more worthy of that mantle, and that’s precisely because it was overloaded.) Nolan is like an upscale J. J. Abrams, but that scale doesn’t rise too high—and, as much as I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun (I had it, too), I think people are exercising themselves unduly by climbing it. It may be amusing, and maybe a little trippy, but Inception—coming a decade after The Matrix, and five after The Twilight Zone—isn’t even that original. C’mon, people. This didn’t even leave me with the tingle that Shutter Island did, despite the continued solidity of DiCaprio’s acting. Only one scene here came close to the emotional bonanza of the Scorsese film, and that was its simplest: when, at the end, Cobb cradles his wife as she shrivels to oblivion in the intimacy of a formless void. A black hole is the perfect metaphor for where most of Nolan’s emotional currents end up. My dislike of The Dark Knight is all too well documented, but Inception is wounded by the same failings. Nolan mines for human material where there is none—in pulp—and yet seems oblivious to it in its natural habitat. He’s in his own dreamworld, and I wish someone would wake him up.

A pair of U.S. Marshals—Teddy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck (Mark Ruffalo)—disembark a mist-shrouded ferry and set foot on Shutter Island, home of the Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a maximum-security prison in the Massachusetts Bay. One of the inmates—whom the chief psychologist, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), refers to as “patients”—has gone missing. Rachel (Emily Mortimer) returns, inexplicably and without a scratch. As storm clouds converge on the island, Teddy becomes increasingly paranoid; its jagged shores are littorally inescapable. The authorities have ignored his; they’ve taken his gun, withheld paperwork, and worst of all, the whole shebang seems to be under the sway of a former Nazi (Max von Sydow). Another Rachel appears (a razor-sharp Patricia Clarkson); the House Un-American Activities Committee’s name is dropped (it’s the McCarthy era—1954); and Teddy suffers from migraines and oracular dreams: visions of his wife (Michelle Williams)—who was supposedly burnt to a crisp by an arsonist who happens to be committed on the island—alternate with the suffering children of Dachau, which Teddy helped liberate as a G.I.

This is a gothic storm of a movie, and it’s awash with melodramatic touches and nods to old films noir. Yes, the Bernard Herrmannian horns honk at you like traffic in Midtown Manhattan; and, yes, the investigators wear fedoras; and Teddy’s subordinate calls him “Boss”; and the shrinks speak in slippery platitudes while wearing tweeds; and the inmates jump out of dark corners and give you the willies. But all these touches add to the dense, painterly texture of the film. According to A.O. Scott, Scorsese “forces you to study the threads on the rug he is preparing … to pull out from under you.” I didn’t feel “forced,” but found the rug perfectly sewn; each thread can be stitched back together. (It’s a rare pleasure to have thrillers like this exercise one’s mental needle.) Salon compares Shutter Island to a film by David Lynch—but Lynch’s meanings don’t conform to a logical structure; this can be reconstructed in a manner that is absolutely, pellucidly, meticulously sane. Is it a work of depth and subtlety? Well—definitely not subtlety. But does that mean that Scorsese is, as David Edelstein asserts, “farther from reality than his hero is”? Formal perfection is always a little supernatural. At any rate, I prefer this maniacal professionalism—Scrosese’s 40-year endeavor to blend opera with genre filmmaking—to that of A Serious Man, which was a snub to anyone who tried to parse the Coens’ threads.

In a film this dense and dynamic, consistency can be both miraculous and conservative. When Scott—whose evaluation is uncharacteristically tsk-tsk-tsky—calls Shutter Island “airless,” I can understand why: There isn’t much breathing room. He and Edelstein, critics whom I admire, fall into rubrics a.) and c.). I can only offer, without risk of being called a spoilsport, part of why I’m still sympathetic to b.). Scorsese is no stranger to madness; his work has always been deliriant, and his oeuvre is spiked with psychopaths. Taxi Driver is one of the best character studies ever financed by Hollywood, and one of the most vertiginous downward spirals. But while you’re watching it, you know that cabbie is a little bit loopy. Watching Shutter Island, you may start to wonder about yourself. The third-act revelation may not be entirely original, but I was so caught up in the cobwebs of rationalization that it had the bite of a spider. (Perhaps some willful gullibility is required for the venom to take effect.) Shutter Island doesn’t connect to societal upheaval the way Taxi Driver and Mean Streets did; or celebrity culture the way The King of Comedy did; or the Patriot Act the way The Departed did. But it might prompt you to examine your own susceptibility to delusion; it might induce you to think like a madman.

When we first meet Teddy, DiCaprio’s Boston accent reminded me of those Red Sox window stickers with Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) pissing on the Yankees logo. In other words, he comes on a little strong. DiCaprio improves, however, when his anger downshifts to desperation. Ruffalo has a face that belongs in old movies; his swarthy, sympathetic visage lends itself to wounded trust. Kingsley and von Sydow never lose their composure in the sort of roles that the aging John Carradine once took on. Although he doesn’t have much screen time, Ted Levine plays the warden in such an impishly disarming way that he seemed to be a medieval demon tunneling his way inside Teddy’s bone marrow; he’s like a just-one-of-the-guys microcosm of Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds. If he’s the devil on Teddy’s shoulder, Williams’s wife is the angel—and she’s a banshee of a femme fatale. With her flowing yellow hair, Williams has a soft, otherworldly, ambiguous presence; when she crumbles to dust, it seems in character.

Where does the c.) come in and mingle with the b.)? I think Elbert Ventura is on to something when he argues that Scorsese idolizes the studio-system “hacks” who made all sorts of popular genre pictures but squeezed in enough of themselves to form a watermark on the reels. This from a director whose intimate masterworks would have left John Ford or Howard Hawks scratching their heads; at the time, his style was like nails in their coffins. And yet, even then, their industrial style informed his personal vision. As far back as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Scorsese’s been showing off his prowess on their very own sets. Now that he’s finally landed as an “establishment” figure, his watermark is getting diluted in direct variation with the flood of money now being poured on him from the studios—or so the argument goes. But, on the count that Shutter Island is “impersonal … and a waste of time,” I disagree.

Maybe I didn’t feel the “insistent throb of a sensibility burning to get something out of [Scorsese’s] system,” but I felt that Shutter Island was more than a fanboy’s puzzle. It’s a plunge into a man’s moral breakdown—a coming to terms with the plaque that accumulates in a person’s soul—that’s not unfamiliar in the filmmaker’s work. But it was done in such a way that I’ve never before seen in his work. The wounds might have been inflicted by pop-psych stimuli, amplified and sensationalized enough to reach a mainstream audience (Laeta Kalogridis’s script is based on a bestseller by Dennis Mystic River Lehane); but the way Scorsese explores these feelings indicates a personal affinity with his subject, even if that subject is of less interest than those who’ve come before. I think it’s telling that some critics complain that this movie has delusions of grandeur while others believe it’s an impersonal pot boiler. Sure, at 67, Scorsese may be at low ebb; statistically speaking, his best days are probably behind him. But, as Ventura concedes, Scorsese’s low ebb is high tide for most blockbusters.

This isn’t to say that film noir is a Teflon genre; it’s been a popular pomo-tivator for artists in the last few decades, partly because of the movies’ idiosyncratic gaudiness. Filmmakers understandably like to toy with canted angles and chiaroscuro, with light filtering in from louvers, and the silvery wisps of smoke that hover in it. All this can be show-offish, yes, but it’s also shorthand for how yummy those dark corners of civilization can be. (The problem arises when filmmakers overwork the fancy-pants effects to compensate for their creative shortcomings—when, after the smog disappears, and the coughing fit abates, one sees that there was nothing behind the fumes.) Crucially, though, noirs’ nocturnal underworlds betray outdated notions of justice and evil. Modern filmmakers who’ve co-opted the noir style—such as the Coen brothers, David Lynch, and, to an extent, Martin Scorsese—can dig the ostentation while still having it inform their descants.

Like most factory-film genres, noirs were often normative. Bad things happened to bad people in most Hollywood releases; but, in noirs alone—following in the ’30s gangster movies’ wake—the bad people were the protagonists. (I’m speaking less about detective features than I am thrillers like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, which, like Broken Embraces, concerned infidelity.) By contrast, the lawmen and pioneers of Westerns were poster children for good-ol’ American Progress. Until circa Vietnam, the notion that our frontier forebears were anything but tough-willed and pure at heart was considered unsalable in the mass-media marketplace. However, the dregs dredged up by noirs (which were set in the present day) were everymen who’d given in to temptation. By the standards of 1940s and ’50s censorship, those were justified grounds for finger wagging; but, to audiences, such indiscretions were probably a welcome relief from their usual doses of Hollywood virtue. Some noirs winked at the audience from behind their censorial cages: If Bogart and Bacall’s double entendres in The Big Sleep were literalized, their dirty talk might make sexters squeamish. But all noirs were products of repression—censorial and societal.

Francisco Franco prehistory aside, Almodóvar’s blue-skied Madrid seems as repressive as a topless beach. The only agent of repression in Broken Embraces is, true to form, the rich cuckolded husband (José Luis Gómez). He knew all along that he wouldn’t be able to maintain his grip on lovely Lena (Penélope Cruz—performing well, though lacking the vivacity she had in Vicky Cristina Barcelona), particularly when she signed up to make her acting début in a film by pickup artist Mateo (Lluís Homar), alias: Harry Caine.

Mateo’s pseudonym (a reference to Postman author James M. Cain?) is one of Almodóvar’s sundry allusions. But they’re all signs pointing in the wrong direction. These aren’t red herrings that keep our minds in flux as we parse through the core mystery; rather, they remind us of how minimal the mystery is. I don’t want to give away the story too much because Almodóvar has a smooth, masterly way of threading us through it that’s pleasurable in and of itself. But his patience and playfulness, his commitment to the cast and its characters—all positive attributes for a filmmaker—seem to whitewash the noir.

In the ’40s classics, the huffy heavies—small-time evil—were vanquished by the end credits; in ’70s neo-noirs (such as Chinatown), evil trickled down from the top, and was not so easily placated. Here, evil is basically nonexistent; evil is the red herring. In a high Hitchcockian pirouette, the jealous industrialist knocks his openly cheating inamorata down a staircase; but he and his Eurotrashy frumplet of a son (Rubén Ochandiano) draw the line on dirty deeds there. (The hoary cuckold isn’t sexually infirm, but the movie climaxes early.) Perhaps I’m depraved on some level, but Broken Embraces—by annulling, rather than solving, the “mystery”—didn’t give me the release I wanted; Almodóvar lines up the dominoes and then… they evaporate. Even the director’s heady bouts of meta-filmmaking—the movie opens on an eye—are weak sauce. They don’t cohere. With little visual cues to Peeping Tom, etc., he’s throwing cineastes off his trail; but that leaves no solid ground for us to stand on. In some ways, the resolution is downright inadequate: The tragedy could be blamed on one character’s negligence, and yet, for all his Mediterranean ardor, guilt doesn’t affect him much.

But it must sound as though I hated the movie. Not true. If it goes wrong—and quite clearly I think it does—it’s for the right reason: Almodóvar’s generosity—his artistry—transcends this noir-ish mishmash. Like chocolates, noirs are better dark. But they require someone like Lynch working within their framework—someone who can make the old conventions mean something new, someone who makes the darkness seem immanent. Almodóvar is simply too sunny. In this world of Broken Embraces, evil can be peeled off like a Band Aid.

One could have hardly expected a linear narrative in the directorial début of Charlie Kaufman, the man who penned Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Synecdoche begins in the real world of stage director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), whose production of Death of a Salesman is premiered to great acclaim. For once, the artist-hero’s professional life is spotlessly meteoric; it’s everything else in his life that sucks. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) confesses to having joyful fantasies of Cotard’s death while they’re in couples’ therapy with their self-promoting bimbo of a therapist (Hope Davis). Adele jets to Germany, and takes their beloved daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein), with her. And Cotard has other problems. His health is an H.M.O.’s nightmare: He becomes a baton passed between dispassionate doctors. And, though his artistic stature affords him plenty of opportunities for romantic liaisons, Cotard can never quite consummate his flings—including the one that we in the audience are most primed to want him to have: an affair with the quirky ticket-window lady, Hazel (Samantha Morton). Here’s a man who gets a MacArthur grant—a free-pass to complete his magnum opus—and yet he’s a perennial downer. He’s the Charles Foster Kane of artists.

Cotard wants to use the grant to produce something honest, so he decides to make a play about his life, and procures what appears to be an abandoned warehouse for his theater. Well, it’s really not a theater, for it houses no audience—only an ever-growing scale reproduction of Cotard’s native Schenectady. His play really is his life. Hazel, now his assistant, watches as their doubles meander about and eventually require doubles of their own. And so on, and so on. Cotard does not let his art imitate his life, he uses his art to duplicate his life, and that which is his “real” life becomes a jumbled mash-up of frayed plot threads and motifs. Kaufman deliberately skewers the timeline, and blurs the line between reality and fiction, but Kaufman lacks the patience and lucidity of David Lynch at his best—think Mulholland Drive compared to Inland Empire. Yes, I get that disorientation is his point, and no, it’s not “over my head.” One reviewer called the writer-director a “master of mindfuckery.” That’s rather inaccurate—and if it wasn’t, I might’ve dropped a variant of that ol’ grin-inducer, too. Kaufman isn’t fucking with anybody’s mind; he’s lost in his own.

A “synecdoche” (for those of you not up on your obscure literary terminology or words that rhyme with cities in Upstate New York) is a part of something representing its whole. Kaufman, like Cotard, sees himself as an isolated part of an intangible whole, one voice in a sea of billions. But what occurs in Synecdoche is something of an irony: His voice overpowers our individual responses. The structure may be baroque, but the dialogue and ideas become so externalized that our minds have no room to play; we’re muddled by too great a volume of information presented to us, not by too many layers. That is what distinguishes this cerebral thunderstorm from, say, There Will Be Blood. Paul Thomas Anderson gives us a gift box and lets us shake it; Kaufman, in Synecdoche, tears off the wrapping paper before we get a chance to guess at the box’s contents.

There’s a sense that Kaufman is trying to top each of his previous credits—to topple film itself. It’s an attempt not just to break, but shatter, the fourth wall—a study of the futility of doing exactly what he’s set out to do: turn real life into fiction, and fiction into reality. (He’s not merely trying to get outside his head. Like Cotard’s Schenectady simulacrum, this movie is supposed to be a physical manifestation of Kaufman’s mind, and an invitation for us to keep him company inside it.) But, the real world is too large and complex for theater (or cinema) to do it justice—a built-in justification for Synecdoche’s surrealism—and, as his hero discovers, you cannot live solely in your own head or life will pass you by. Kaufman has built in so many layers of recursion, and loaded this film with a life’s worth of philosophical wonderings and anxieties; but while Synecdoche is intensely personal, it’s also implacably cluttered. Kaufman’s ideas are both cogent and cohesive; they transcend the movie’s density. The problem is that the ideas are so raw and close to the surface that they begin to take precedence over the story; it violates the writer’s credo: “Show, don’t tell.” As a feature, Synecdoche is like an experimental short extended too far—a long, rambling joke that continues to be set up long after you’ve ascertained the punchline.

To their credit, the actors never lose touch with the characters; they are brilliantly sustained. The performers have, however, caught Kaufman’s lugubriousness bug. Hoffman is droll in just about every role I’ve ever seen him in; you could cast him as the lead in The Passion of the Christ, and he’d still have that subversive wit—his saving grace. Here, he hits the right tone of (reluctantly) detached irony—that not-quite-self-awareness that’s typically labeled “Kafkaesque.” (Hey, if Kaufman can reference The Trial, why can’t I…?) But poor Hoffman, as this sick, addled theater director, is blobbier than usual; you tire of your urge to kick this sluggard into getting off his arse and doing something. Morton, however, seems almost unrecognizable as Hazel, who floats about like a shy bubble that Cotard’s sharp sorrow perpetually pops. Her sweet pathos earns her rapport with the audience.

Unfortunately, despite their talent, the cast gets caught in Kaufman’s maelstrom. Like painters who throw globs of paint onto a canvas, Kaufman is whamming every idea he has onto celluloid; he’s splattering layer upon layer, before the last has even dried—as if his ideas have expiration dates, and those dates are fast approaching. Synecdoche is a work of depth, honesty, intelligence, humor (thank God), and passion, but more intimate, detailed explorations of Kaufman’s gnawing neuroses could be equally—or surpassingly—deep, honest, intelligent, humorous, and passionate if not explored en masse. There’s so much material here that Kaufman should take a cue from Obama and “spread the wealth.” (Perhaps he also shouldn’t regard Adele’s miniscule paintings so flippantly…) Having seen the movies produced from Kaufman’s previous scripts (as handled by other directors), I know he is capable of such work. But, after Synecdoche, he must’ve thought he’d never get the directorial reins again. In this film’s grandiose terms, how could he produce a successive picture that could ever “topple” this?