Kaufman’s playhouse
In his review of “Synecdoche, New York,” Roger Ebert called Charlie Kaufman “one of the few truly important writers to make screenplays his medium.” I agree with Ebert on the basis of Kaufman’s expansive imagination. Like the mythic Daedalus, Kaufman builds labyrinthine structures so complex and so dangerous that he himself can barely escape from them. When I left the theater, I had an inclination to check the obituary pages for Kaufman’s name, just to be sure this mad genius had survived not only the painstaking blueprint for “Synecdoche” but its realization, as well. (The film is also...
