Directed by Charlie Kaufman • 2008 • United States
Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Jennifer Jason Leigh

Philip Seymour Hoffman stars in Charlie Kaufman’s magnum opus as Caden Cotard, a theater director whose life catering to suburban blue-hairs at the local regional theater in Schenectady, New York, is looking bleak. His wife (Catherine Keener) has left him to pursue her painting in Berlin. His therapist (Hope Davis) is better at plugging her bestseller than she is at counseling him. A new relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel (Samantha Morton) has prematurely run aground. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions. Worried about the transience of life, he gathers an ensemble cast at a New York warehouse, hoping to create a work of brutal honesty. As the years fold into each other and Caden buries himself deeper into his masterpiece, the textured tangle of real and theatrical relationships blurs the line between the world of the play and that of Caden’s own deteriorating reality.