David Lancaster

I feel like I can guess correctly in the first ten minutes of a movie if I’ll like the rest, and I suspected I wouldn’t like Charlie Kaufman’s latest project about nine minutes in, but I underestimated my eventual disdain for it. Since “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation” rank among my favorite films, I am keen to give Kaufman’s work a fighting chance, despite having reviled “Synecdoche, New York.” The seemingly unending opening sequence in a car purports to introduce us to Lucy, Jake and their about-to-end relationship as they head through a snowstorm to Jake’s parents’ in-the-middle-of-nowhere home. Once there (good god, finally) the film's most entertaining (albeit mystifying) scenes involve a remarkably tense dinner as Jake’s parents reveal themselves to be borderline psychotic as they ride a roller coaster of emotions, inappropriate questions/comments/reactions and apparent ages. One would normally wonder why Lucy doesn’t run screaming from the house. Ah, but this is Charlie Kaufman, and he has more up his sleeve than mere normalcy. Or maybe less; it’s hard to know. I’ll concede that some viewers will find Kaufman’s peculiar filmic vocabulary deliciously intriguing. I did not. As other reviewers have noted, the acting is superb, wasted, in my view, on this ultimately time-wasting film.