(2008) A figure of speech in which a part represents the whole. In his local newspaper on November 2nd, 2005, theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) reads of theater director Harold Pinter's death.

Surrounded by illness and viruses, contagion and pestilence, fearful of dying, he suffers a head injury when a plumbing fixture bursts, striking him in the forehead: stitches followed by a visit to an ophthalmologist who recommends seeing a neurologist. His face breaks out from sycosis. (Or perhaps he lives in Schenectady and has psychosis.) He imagines seeing himself in TV commercials and cartoons.

Caden and his wife Adele (Catherine Keener), an artist who produces tiny canvases of nudes (requiring magnifying glasses for viewing), seek marriage counseling from Dr Madeleine Gravis (Hope Davis); Adele decides to take their four-year-old daughter Olive to Berlin for her exhibition without Caden. He suffers a seizure; his box-office girl Hazel (Samantha Morton), who resides in a burning house, hits on him.

After successfully directing Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman with a youthful cast, Caden receives a MacArthur Genius Grant with which he plans on producing a massive theater piece: "the truth not yet spoken." This frustratingly fascinating film (not understanding is the first step to understanding), written by Charlie Kaufman in his directorial debut, spreads out on the screen like a huge abstract-expressionist painting.

Lonely and lovelorn in his exploration of hurtling toward death, Caden marries an actress, Claire Keen (Michelle Williams), with whom he has another daughter; he reads from Olive's diary (left behind when she left for Germany) in which he follows a written record of her ongoing life. He flies to Germany where he discovers that seven years have passed since Adele left him, that she's remarried to a German, and that Olive has become the muse for the work of lesbian tattoo artist Marie (Jennifer Jason Leigh).

Inside the vast interior of an abandoned warehouse, he recreates the personal milieu of his Manhattan - "I won't settle for anything less than the brutal truth" - a project that goes on for decades; he reminds a cameraman: "You're in the scene, not just filming it."

Playing themselves playing themselves (How does one perform at being authentic to oneself?), real people and actors reenact Caden's existence and their own. (How does one act out a meaningful life?)

Sam, who has been studiously following the director's career and life for a score of years, auditions to be Caden; another Sammy takes the role of being Sam. Hazel, who has married Derek, says to Caden of Sam: "He reminds me of you." But as Caden's assistant she doesn't agree with having Tammy (Emily Watson) taking her part in the drama.

Adele's housemaid, Ellen Bascomb (Dianne Wiest), offering her interpretation of his character - he's already dead, straddling two worlds, in confusion inside a mixed-up chronology - exchanges roles with Caden, who cleans Adele's apartment.

From time to time, he changes the title from Simulacrum to Unknown, Unkissed, and Lost to The Obscure Moon Lighting an Obscure World to Infectious Diseases in Cattle. It's about dating and death, agrees Caden: "It's about everything." Therefore, everyone who has in any way whatsoever touched Caden's life must be represented, given his or her due.

Occasionally the actors improvise, doing what actual people didn't say or do, with tragic consequences. People are waiting between being unborn and dead, says a priest, waiting in that minute fraction of eternity for connection, something to happen. As the years pass, the actual people in his life age and pass on; replacements continue the audienceless performance.

An aged Caden wears an earpiece, giving him cues and instructions: "Everyone is everyone…. It's time for you to understand this." The warehouse has become a series of nested environments; outside lie dead bodies, like corpuses in a glass-encased ant farm, lacking a queen to replenish the colony. As he has said many times before, Caden reiterates after a fresh epiphany: "I know how to do this play now."

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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