I have to say… this one is WAY overrated. I know, I’m surprised too. I can’t believe I’m saying it and I wish I felt differently, but I really don’t like this movie.

I mean, there are movies that hold your hand as they walk you through the story and there are movies that leave matters open for audience interpretation, but I felt like this one kept me at arm’s length. I found this movie to be fucking impenetrable, mostly because of the characters.

Don’t get me wrong, the actors acquit themselves marvelously with what they’re given. I just can’t stand these characters. Take Philip Seymour Hoffman’s protagonist, for example. Yes, he played the semi-neurotic shlub played by John Cusack, Nicolas Cage and Jim Carrey before him; but unlike those characters, this one lacks a clear objective. Cusack, for example, was an amazing puppeteer, very passionate about his craft. Nicolas Cage struggled to write a screenplay. Jim Carrey wanted to forget his girlfriend before he wanted to remember her. Hoffman, however, was simply a stage director with absolutely no clear idea of what he was working toward or why he was doing it.

If the protagonist of a story has no objective then the story has no objective. If the story isn’t visibly moving toward an established end then the audience will be bored to tears.

Then there’s the matter of the mistresses, played by Michelle Williams and Samantha Morton. From the start of the movie, I kept asking what the fuck these ladies saw in Hoffman’s character. I never got an answer.

And then there’s the matter of the world this movie took place in. A world where psychiatrists are vapid money-grubbers, doctors refer patients to other doctors without ever explaining what’s going on and houses are perfectly good places to purchase and live in, even when they can miraculously burn for eight decades straight.

The premise for this movie depended on two distinct worlds: The world inside the New York warehouse and the one outside it. One of them had to be a shelter for Hoffman and the other had to be a nonsensical world, hostile to him. With this setup, we’d have a much clearer idea of what Hoffman is trying to accomplish and the two worlds help define each other. Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine both used this concept to marvelous effect. But in Synecdoche, both worlds are totally insane and beyond comprehension, resulting in a confused clusterfuck of a film.

I wish I could list more complaints. I wish I could type down the times when I thought “What the fuck…?” or “Isn’t this movie over yet?!” But I can’t. I’ve already forgotten them. I remember a few moments from the last half hour or so, but everything before that point has somehow escaped my memory already. I found the proceedings to be that pointless and that forgettable.

The long and short of it, to paraphrase something Benjamin “Yahtzee” Croshaw once said, any movie-watching experience that feels like work generally isn’t going to get a good write-up. The acting performances were very good, but that doesn’t make up for the interminable story, the godawful pacing, the horrid attempts at satirical quirkiness or the characters that simply aren’t relatable.