Film, as it’s been both said and proven time and again, is chiefly a director’s medium. Television is the area in which writers can most clearly and lastingly establish a distinct voice for themselves. However, just like most of the movies he’s penned, Charlie Kaufman defies the restrictions of that categorization.

In fact, his filmography reads like a list of some of the most subversive, idiosyncratically trippy and dazzlingly audacious movies of the past decade (regardless of whether one thought they succeeded or not): Being John Malkovich, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Human Nature, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Thus, somewhat unusually, there’s already a distinguishable persona attached to Kaufman’s self-penned directorial debut – Synecdoche, New York, a sprawling, contemplative and imaginative work in which the literal and metaphorical collide in sardonic and sometimes surprisingly affecting fashion. 

Attempting to condense the plot of Synecdoche, New York in a way that’s representative of the whole is perhaps an exercise in folly, but here goes. Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as Caden Cotard, a New York theater director whose life starts to contract on him. His marriage to Adele (Catherine Keener), a painter of miniatures and celebrated artist in her own right, is fraying, and a mysterious physical (psychosomatic?) malady is shutting down his autonomic functions one by one. Things get worse when a flirtatious, would-be affair with box office ticket girl Hazel (Samantha Morton) runs aground before it even really catches fire, and Adele runs off to Europe with Caden’s daugther. 

Honored with a MacArthur grant that gives him hope of creating a work of brutal honesty, Caden launches himself into a massive, Mike Leigh-esque undertaking, hiring hundreds of actors to craft an improvised, much-workshopped “living play” in a giant warehouse that contains an ever-growing mock-up of the city outside. He even hires actors Sammy (Tom Noonan) and Tammy (Emily Watson), to play himself and Hazel, which helps contribute to the mental deterioration of new wife Clare (Michelle Williams), his former leading lady. 

Synecdoche, New York (the title is pronounced “sih-neck-doh-kee”) is a movie that has the capacity to enthrall and frustrate in perhaps equal measure. For a while it unfolds as a more or less straightforward drama about a man caught up in his own head, albeit with a few heightened touches of absurdism. (Hazel lives in a house that is literally on fire, and for years Caden peruses his daughter’s forward-reading diary, long after she’s left.) Later, the movie becomes a series of slipstream moments, scattered marbles of life that serve as emotive triggers and placeholders as much if not more than conventional dramatic fodder. 

What I can most easily and honestly say about Kaufman’s id-tickling picture is that it has both enormous, insistent ambition and a soul, which are so frequently mutually exclusive in modern American movies. “Like” is a hard word to attach to it, not because it’s punishing or depressing, but just because it doesn’t coddle or pander to an audience. It’s largely about death and creative struggle, but it’s also whimsical and hopeful. There are a few bits with which to quibble, but it’s mostly an engrossing experience — funny, mildly unnerving, (there’s a pinch of domestic creepiness that would make David Lynch proud), and affecting in unexpected, tangential ways… much like life itself, actually. (R, opens on 10/24)  

Mister Lonely, the first film in eight years from Harmony Korine, the erstwhile L’enfant terrible screenwriter behind 1995’s Kids, and later Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy, summons to mind lyrics from U2’s “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”: “Dressing like your sister/Living like a tart/They don’t know what you’re doing/Babe, it must be art!” Of course that song, a one-off contribution to the soundtrack for 1995’s Batman Forever, is acknowledged exercise in ironic, self-referential vamping. 

Co-written with his brother Avi, Korine’s movie is part deadpan acting class exercise and part metaphorical art school construct. It’s also never less than wholly sincere, which is why it comes off as such a tangled mess of unruly intentions, like the drunken, yammering high school friend trying to tell you three stories at once.

The main story here centers around a Parisian Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) and takes her up on an impulsive offer to move back with her to a commune in the Scottish Highlands. Here Marilyn lives with her husband Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant), daughter Shirley Temple, and a group of other impersonators that include Sammy Davis Jr., Abraham Lincoln, The Three Stooges, Madonna, Buckwheat, and James Dean.

All the nutty goings-on at this island for misfit toys – which include ping-pong, drunken carousing, and prepping for a talent show that will in theory provide a much-needed cash infusion – are crosscut with unrelated events in a Latin American jungle, where nuns flying food-drop aid missions with a chattering priest (Werner Herzog) come to realize they are blessed with a special gift.

Korine has an undeniable eye for images:  Witness the slow-motion opening credit sequence set to Bobby Vinton’s heartbreaking title tune, and some amazing skydiving nun footage, as well as an occasionally deft touch with mood. What he needs though, is someone to impose more rigid structure. Very loosely, Mister Lonely is about locating thankfulness in a topsy-turvy world, and yet part of its dark metaphorical conclusion relates to the special death that those who dare to dream out loud die. (Very literally, the commune’s diseased sheep are put down early in the movie, yet similarly harsh fates await other characters.)

Korine seems to lose interest in Michael Jackson as a focal-point and the film suffers as a consequence. Without him as our cracked protagonist, or a stronger sense of the ensemble characters, things that could or should be funny — like Buckwheat giving an unruly, sobbing Pope a bath, or Lincoln riding bitch on a motorcycle– only serve to reinforce the point that Mister Lonely is less than the sum of its colorful parts.