Charlie Kaufman wasn’t at the reception for his new film, Synecdoche, New York, on Tuesday night. Instead, actor Tom Noonan, one of the stars of the film, stepped in.

Noonan appeared on stage with producer Spike Jonze to present the film, both men backlit by a projected green screen in the posh, but acoustically challenged, Montalban Theater in Hollywood. Noonan, who has won acclaim (and awards) for screenplays and films of his own but who has stuck in my mind mostly for his comedic portrayal of Frankenstein in the 1987 flick The Monster Squad, towered over the producer.

“Charlie Kaufman can’t make it tonight,” Jonze said, “so we’ve asked Tom Noonan to play him instead.”

Noonan went along with the gag (which he later told me was unplanned), stepping forward to the microphone and muttering nonsense under his breath. Then he tapped the mike a few times and said softly but directly, “Thanks for coming.” Then they rolled the film.

The setup was fitting for a movie in which actors portray other actors and theater crews build stages representing other stages representing the real New York City.

If Kaufman had failed, his new film would have been about nothing—that’s generally what you get when you try to tell a story about everything and everyone. But through some clever plot devices and storytelling, he pulled it off. The content of the film seems to spill out into the world and encompass the viewer, the viewer’s neighbor, sisters, brothers, cousins, friends, colleagues, Kaufman himself, the guy overseas who handles your customer service call, you know, everyone.

Kaufman’s growing reputation rests on a knack for penning painfully honest, oddball comedies (or are they tragedies?), such as Being John Malkovich or Adaptation, but Synecdoche put him in the director’s chair for the first time. As it were, the film played well for both audiences and critics when it premiered earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, and he certainly seems to have nailed this one.

Not everyone will like it, since it tries to be about so much that some will walk away thinking it wasn’t about anything at all. After the show, one person told me it was the worst Kaufman film to date and that he didn’t empathize with or care about any of the characters. Another person called it “masturbatory, pretentious and self-important.” But others generally liked it, even if they said they found it confusing and needed to watch it again.

Kaufman’s main plot trick was simple in concept, tricky in execution. The central character, Caden Cotard (played unsurprisingly well by Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a theater director bent on creating the ultimate director’s cut, something true and honest and real. To do so, he builds an ever more elaborate set that comes to fill a hangar-sized theater with a replica of several New York City blocks. He directs his actors to play out the minute-by-minute minutiae of their characters’ lives, day after day, in a production that spans the remainder of Caden’s life (and that of virtually everyone else in the film). As the play evolves, Caden finds that to be truthful he must tell stories about real people, so he hires actors to play himself and everyone he knows. But he soon recognizes that the actors playing the real people are real people, themselves, and that he must hire other actors to play them.

At one point, Caden voices some of the anxiety which propels him through this increasingly mad and dreamlike production. “There are no extras in life,” he says, and that’s part of the problem. Theater (or film, for that matter) is limited by time and space to telling a finite story about a handful of characters. Caden wants to tell the story of everyone, but life is too ungainly to capture—the idea of trying to make a play about everything is patently absurd. And really, Caden fails, because no matter how large his stage or how many players he brings into the hangar, it is still a mockup of real life, and it can never faithfully portray everyone’s pain and joy and love and all they do and all that happens to them.

But where Caden fails, Kaufman succeeds. Consider the title. Synecdoche is actually a literary device in which a part represents its whole, or one thing represents a class of things, or the other way around. We say we pay $3.50 a gallon at the pump when we mean at the gas station, or we say Hollywood when we mean the entire film industry, or we say beast when we mean tiger. The characters in this film represent all of us, just as the warehouse-sized theater represents all of New York. Watching the film is like standing between two mirrors and seeing infinity. In one of many allusions to this mirror play (or Russian Nesting dolls, if you prefer), a character holds a card with a picture of the warehouse-theater. They open a little window flap on the card that reveals a tiny picture of another warehouse inside. And all of this is taking place inside the actual warehouse. It requires the slightest shift in perspective—a glance over the shoulder, even—to see the reality reflected in these infinite mirrors, and you realize the movie is about you.

I spoke with Tom Noonan after the movie was over about his experience playing an actor playing a director (he played Sammy Barnathan, who plays director Caden Cotard, who arguably represents real-life director Charlie Kaufman) and about the meaning behind this movie.

“That’s all you’re doing, too (is acting),” he said. “You’re imitating your father who’s imitating his father who imitated his uncle or someone else. Isn’t that what we all do?” he said.

I could buy that.

But Noonan also said that people go to movies just “to be reminded of what it’s like to be alive, to realize something about yourself,” and that for Kaufman there wasn’t really any intended meaning to the movie. I didn’t buy that.

Self-realization is absolutely part of the movie-going experience, but this film draws you in as a character and tells you who you are. It makes a blatant point. You’re Caden, you’re the cleaning lady, you’re the priest and Caden’s first wife and second wife and both daughters and his parents. You’re everyone, and so is everyone else.

In a poignant and heartrending speech that Kaufman reportedly wrote the night before they shot the scene, a priest tells all those assembled at a funeral (which is being reenacted after the real funeral has already occurred) that they are missing opportunities to live their lives, to make their own paths, because they are too afraid and too lonely to make choices. He’s talking to everyone, including me and the other people watching the movie at the Montalban Theater in Hollywood. You’re all waiting for someone else to come along and change your life, he’s saying; you’re waiting for something to happen to you, rather than making something happen. And in so doing, you’re ignoring everyone else around you who’s going through the same thing. It’s the human condition in a few short lines, and it’s consistent with what has been happening to Caden’s character throughout the movie, as he loses his autonomic functions (i.e. muscle control, salivation) and ultimately loses his ability to move without being directed how to move. He becomes a puppet, an extreme and literal manifestation of the condition described by the priest.

Reportedly Spike Jonze originally wanted Kaufman to do a horror script, and certainly some of that horror remains in the unsettling music and the terrible way in which nightmares and absurdities are part of the fabric of the film’s reality. Not being able to control your own body, losing control of your life, living inside a burning house (yes, a burning house). But the project morphed gradually into something entirely different than either Jonze or Kaufman had intended (if you have the gall to say that Kaufman intended anything). But that’s all just part of the creative process. Even if the film evolved haphazardly, with Kaufman throwing in the burning house for fun and writing that speech last-minute, there’s a carefully controlled order to the finished product that suggests a fully realized and incredibly complex and layered version of an idea Shakespeare summed up in a few lines:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

Did Kaufman succeed in showing us that theater is a metaphor for all of life? Yes. I’m still ambivalent about what it means to have made a film like this. When I finally finished reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, I immediately concluded it was a book that needed to be written and now that it was done nothing like it should ever be attempted again. Like Synecdoche, Joyce’s book wasn’t so much about the characters as it was about what it means to be human, to be thinking almost simultaneously about the quality of that morning’s sex and the day’s to-do list while purchasing groceries and noticing the booger hanging from the clerk’s nose hair. Fine, I get it—our minds are mysterious and life is really just a stream of occurrences both mundane and extraordinary, and we’re all the same in the end. Synecdoche may be the film medium’s equivalent of that.

But since the movie’s really about everything in life, I’d have to write multiple reviews cataloguing how Kaufman treated the stories of Caden’s successive wives and lovers (all played by stellar actresses), or the relationship with his estranged daughter, or the identity-bending relationship Caden has with the actress (played by Dianne Wiest) who steps in at the end to take over the play. There’s so much else going on in this film that I can’t possibly cover it all. Instead I’ll have to let this particular review stand for all the reviews I might ever write about Synecdoche, New York.

Tags: being john malkovitch, Caden Cotard, Charlie Kaufman, montalban theatre, New York, spike jonze, Synecdoche, tom noonan