Synecdoche New York

After a touch of English melodrama and an art-house sensation, it's nice to have a simple, down-home story, isn't it? Maybe after this movie, I'll watch something like that.

There are books that seem "unfilmable," impossible to translate from written word to moving picture. "Synecdoche New York" seems the opposite, impossible to translate from moving picture to written word. Doing so makes me think of this article from The Onion.

How about this: Theater director Caden Cotard is abandoned by the one woman he truly cares about -- his daughter Olive, of course -- and spends the rest of his days surrounded by women who want him, despite his ambivalence toward them. Is that angle different enough from anything else written about the film? Probably not. I'll watch it again sometime and I'm sure I'll see something I didn't catch the first time around.

I'll probably find it in the comedy of manners that resulted when actors hired by Cotard to portray the people around him for his mega-play, ended up doing the opposite of what the people they were portraying had actually done in the first place.

And yet it didn't work out for them, either....