Tag Archives: Truman Capote

CARMEN & GEOFFREY: A BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE TO CARMEN DE LAVALLADE

The life of Carmen de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder is examined in low-budget documentary screening at Film Forum

CARMEN & GEOFFREY (Linda Atkinson & Nick Doob, 2006)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Friday, March 6, 6:30
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
firstrunfeatures.com

Film Forum is celebrating the eighty-ninth birthday of the one and only Carmen de Lavallade with a special screening of Linda Atkinson and Nick Doob’s 2006 documentary, Carmen & Geoffrey, along with rare footage of de Lavallade and Alvin Ailey dancing the ballet from Porgy and Bess in Howard Beach for a 1960 television show. Carmen & Geoffrey is an endearing look at de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder’s lifelong love affair with dance — and each other. The New Orleans-born de Lavallade studied with Lester Horton and went to high school with Ailey, whom she brought to his first dance class. Trinidadian Holder was a larger-than-life gentle giant who was a dancer, choreographer, composer, costume designer, actor, director, writer, photographer, painter, and just about anything else he wanted to be.

The two met when they both were cast in Truman Capote and Harold Arlen’s Broadway show House of Flowers in 1954, with the six-foot-six Holder instantly falling in love with de Lavallade; they were together until 2014, when he passed away at the age of eighty-four. Atkinson and Doob combine amazing archival footage — of Eartha Kitt, Josephine Baker, Ulysses Dove, de Lavallade dancing with Ailey, and other splendid moments — with contemporary rehearsal scenes, dance performances, and interviews with such stalwarts as dance critic Jennifer Dunning (author of Geoffrey Holder: A Life in Theater, Dance and Art), former Alvin Ailey artistic director Judith Jamison, dancer Dudley Williams, and choreographer Joe Layton (watch out for his eyebrows), along with family members and Gus Solomons jr, who still works with de Lavallade. The film was made on an extremely low budget and it shows, but it is filled with such glorious footage that you’ll get over that quickly.

BrandoCapote

BrandoCapote takes place in a Kyoto hotel that doubles as purgatory (photo by Miguel Aviles)

The Tank
312 West 36th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 24, $25
thetanknyc.org

In 1957, thirty-two-year-old writer and journalist Truman Capote was sent to Kyoto by the New Yorker to do a story on thirty-three-year-old actor Marlon Brando, who was in Japan making Sayonara, Joshua Logan’s movie based on James Michener’s novel about an air force pilot who falls in love with a Japanese dancer during the Korean War. Husband-and-wife team Reid and Sara Farrington use the resulting article, “The Duke in His Domain: Marlon Brando, on Location,” as the jumping-off point for the multimedia production BrandoCapote, continuing at the Tank through November 24. The seventy-minute show, set in the hotel where Capote is interviewing Brando, also incorporates elements of Capote’s 1965 nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood, an investigation into the senseless murder of the Clutter family in Kansas by Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, as well as the tragic circumstances surrounding Brando’s son Christian, daughter Cheyenne, and Cheyenne’s boyfriend, Drag Drollet.

As they have done in such previous dazzling works as The Passion Project, CasablancaBox, Gin & “It,” and A Christmas Carol, the Farringtons use film clips to propel the narrative, projected with pinpoint precision onto Japanese fans and umbrellas that the five-person cast open up and turn toward the audience. For example, a clip of Brando as Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now asking, “Are you an assassin?” is followed by Capote answering, “No no no, I’m a journalist!” The dialogue is a compelling, sometimes confusing patchwork, with some lines spoken live by the actors onstage — Rafael Jordan as Brando, Jennifer McClinton as Capote, Lynn R Guerra as Brando’s mother, Dodie, Laura K Nicoll as Cheyenne, and Cooper Howell as Christian — some from the film clips, and others prerecorded audio snippets (with Sara Farrington and Akiyo Komatsu delivering different vocal impressions of Capote), in which case it is sometimes lip-synced, causing a panoply of beguiling chaos. “He paused, seemed to listen, as though his statement had been tape-recorded and he were now playing it back,” Capote writes of Brando in the article.

Clips from Marlon Brando movies are projected onto such objects as umbrellas to propel the plot of multidisciplinary work at the Tank (photo by Miguel Aviles)

Dressed in colorful kimono designed by Andre Joyner and constructed by Kelvin Gordon-El, the actors move to intricate choreography by Nicoll based on Japanese noh, bunraku, and kabuki traditions that repeats continually throughout the show, as if the director is yelling “Cut!” and the scene is being done over. “Sorry, sorry. Lemme start over. I’m gonna get this right,” Brando says after re-creating a violent scene from A Streetcar Named Desire. There are also excerpts from On the Waterfront, Mutiny on the Bounty, Julius Caesar, Last Tango in Paris, The Missouri Breaks, Sayonara, The Godfather, and other Brando films, many of which deal with childhood and the relationship between parents and children. “The son becomes the father, and the father the son,” Brando as Kal-El says to his infant son in a clip from Superman. “You are all my children,” Brando as Dr. Moreau tells his hideous creations in The Island of Doctor Moreau. Meanwhile, Brando threatens to kill his father if he ever beats his mother, a wanna-be actress, again. And after being called a “sissy” by other kids, Capote says of the bullies, “Buttoned up, boring, faceless nobodies — the kind of son my mother always wanted.”

The set is continually destroyed and resurrrected in Reid and Sara Farrington’s BrandoCapote (photo by Miguel Aviles)

Chairs and tables are overturned, carried offstage, then brought back on as the characters fold up and then ritualistically unfurl long black-and-white or red obi sashes, placing them carefully across the floor. Someone calls out, “Let’s get back to the interview,” and a sound glitch takes the action back to Capote in the hotel, which doubles as purgatory. It all comes off like clockwork, which is fascinating to experience. It is also repetitive in an abstract way, which can be both titillating and aggravating. But it’s always stimulating, both aurally and visually. “I’m not an actor,” Brando says self-effacingly. “I’m a mimic. Everyone is. And I’m not successful.” However, BrandoCapote is, in part by not merely mimicking its two famous celebrities but taking their story to another level.

The Passion Project // BrandoCapote Workshop

Director Reid Farrington, writer Sara Farrington, and performer/choreographer Laura K. Nicoll will present work-in-progress Brando/Capote at Art House Productions

Art House Productions, Inc.
262 17th St., Jersey City
February 21 – March 3, $20-$30
201-918-6019
www.arthouseproductions.org
www.ladyfarrington.com
www.reidfarrington.com

In 2011, we called The Passion Project “a breathtaking tour de force for both creator and director Reid Farrington and performer Laura K. Nicoll.” Farrington and Nicoll are bringing back the show, a mesmerizing and intimate multimedia reimagining of Carl Th. Dreyer’s 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, for eight performances February 21 – March 3 as part of a special repertory program at Art House Productions in Jersey City. On March 1, 2, and 3, Reid and his wife and collaborator, writer Sara Farrington, will also be presenting the work-in-progress BrandoCapote, inspired by Truman Capote’s 1957 New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando while the star was making Sayonara in Tokyo. The piece is performed by Roger Casey, Sean Donovan, Lynn R. Guerra, Gabriel Hernandez, and Nicoll, who also serves as choreographer. The audience is encouraged to stay after the show and offer feedback.

“Though Brando is not a teetotaller, his appetite is more frugal when it comes to alcohol,” Capote writes in the article. “While we were awaiting the dinner, which was to be served to us in the room, he supplied me with a large vodka on the rocks and poured himself the merest courtesy sip. Resuming his position on the floor, he lolled his head against a pillow, drooped his eyelids, then shut them. It was as though he’d dozed off into a disturbing dream; his eyelids twitched, and when he spoke, his voice — an unemotional voice, in a way cultivated and genteel, yet surprisingly adolescent, a voice with a probing, asking, boyish quality — seemed to come from sleepy distances. ‘The last eight, nine years of my life have been a mess,’ he said.”

In addition, on February 27 at 7:00, Art House Productions will host a rough cut of a 3D movie of Reid’s 2014 multimedia work Tyson vs. Ali, a dream match-up pitting Mike Tyson against Muhammad Ali, using live actors, a boxing ring, and movable screens. Admission is pay what you can, and the film will be followed by an informal gathering with the cast and crew. (Tickets for The Passion Project and Brando/Capote are $20 each or $30 for both.)

THIS AIN’T NO DISCO

A talented cast goes back to the glamour days of Studio 54 in This Ain’t No Disco (photo by Ben Arons)

Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 24, $56.50-$111.50
866-811-4111
atlantictheater.org

Getting chosen to go past the velvet ropes and enter the hallowed halls of Studio 54 in the 1970s was like being part of the Rapture. “For what you are about to receive / may you be truly grateful / Who wants to go to heaven with me tonight,” Steve Rubell (Theo Stockman) declares in the world premiere musical This Ain’t No Disco, which opened tonight at the Atlantic. A group of desperate supplicants chant back at Rubell, “Let us in — let us sin.” But if theatergoers start lining up to get inside the Linda Gross Theater to see the new musical, it will be because of the reputation of the glitzy nightspot and the involvement of Stephen Trask, not because of the show itself, which turns out to be as superficial and simulated as the club itself. Trask, the creator, composer, and lyricist for the Obie- and Tony-winning Hedwig and the Angry Inch, cowrote the music and lyrics of Disco with Angry Inch drummer Peter Yanowitz (the Wallflowers, Natalie Merchant) and the book with Yanowitz and Rick Elice (Jersey Boys, The Addams Family); the two-and-a-half-hour show has its share of exhilarating moments, but the behind-the-scenes drama that drives the narrative is tepid and cold.

Sammy (Samantha Marie Ware) and Chad (Peter LaPrade) hope to make their dreams come true in This Ain’t No Disco at the Atlantic (photo by Ben Arons)

While a flamboyantly gay Rubell snorts coke, makes piles of money, and has a disagreement about a hat with the blond-haired, sunglass-wearing Artist (Will Connolly) — it’s not clear why the musical identifies Rubell by name but not Andy Warhol — a bunch of dreamers hope for stardom of various kinds, including experimental artist duo Landa (Lulu Fall) and Meesh (Krystina Alabado), who work the coat check; Forest Hills punk and drug-addicted single mother Sammy (Samantha Marie Ware), an alternate version of Jean-Michel Basquiat; annoying publicist Binky (Chilina Kennedy), looking for her own big break; District Attorney Lamont Brown (Eddie Cooper); and Chad (Peter LaPrade), a graffiti artist who has been turning tricks to survive in the city. As references are made to such club stalwarts as Salvador Dalí, Liza Minnelli, Elton John, Jerry Hall, Truman Capote, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Bianca Jagger, and Richard Gere, Rubell finds himself in quite a mess and the individual stories of the dreamers devolve into stereotypical pablum.

This Ain’t No Disco takes audience inside the hallowed halls of legendary New York City nightclub (photo by Ben Arons)

Early on, Chad sings, “Here the fun never ends / Yeah, I’m having fun,” and there is fun to be had at This Ain’t No Disco, which takes its name from the 1979 Talking Heads song “Life During Wartime.” (“This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco / this ain’t no fooling around / This ain’t no Mudd Club, or CBGB / I ain’t got time for that now.”) Jason Sherwood’s mobile, two-level scaffold set is dynamite, with splashy lighting by Ben Stanton, flashy costumes by Sarah Laux (featuring a lot of bare-chested men in barely there bottoms), projections of a naughty New York on monitors attached to the ceiling and elsewhere, and choreography with plenty of dazzle by Camille A. Brown. But the score is all over the place, too often straying from the kind of music that was heard inside Studio 54 and the Mudd Club in that era and lacking the awesome verve of Hedwig. Sammy is supposed to be punk and Meesh and Landa cutting-edge, but their songs don’t fit who they are and what they want to be. Tony- and Obie-winning director Darko Tresnjak (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, The Killer) can’t find the right balance between the glamour of the Studio 54 lifestyle and the more mundane story of the characters, resulting in a dynamic work that is far more style than substance. No doubt former 1970s club kids will get a kick out of many of the inside jokes while reliving past glory, but the rest of us are likely to not regret for one moment that we never got behind those velvet ropes.

LOVE, CECIL

Documentary reveals Sir Cecil Beaton to be an ambitious dandy with many talents (courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archives at Sotheby’s)

LOVE, CECIL (Lisa Immordino Vreeland, 2017)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Francesca Beale Theater
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
Opens Friday, June 29
212-875-5600
www.filmlinc.org
zeitgeistfilms.com

Love, Cecil is a refreshing, invigorating documentary about Oscar- and Tony-winning fashion and war photographer, diarist, production designer, painter, portraitist, costume designer, illustrator, and one of the most influential dandies of the twentieth century, Sir Cecil Beaton. Writer-director Lisa Immordino Vreeland has followed up her first two feature-length films, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, and Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict — she is Diana Vreeland’s granddaughter-in-law — with another behind-the-scenes journey into the art world and high society, this time explored through the lens of Beaton, who was on a neverending quest to find beauty and success in every part of his life and career. “I started out with very little talent, but I was so tormented with ambition. Once you’ve started for the end of the rainbow, you can’t very well turn back,” he wrote in one of his numerous published diaries, quotes from which are read in voiceover by Rupert Everett throughout the film. The rather self-effacing Beaton, who was born in Hampstead in 1904, was never satisfied, always wanting more. “I exposed thousands of rolls of film, wrote hundreds of thousands of words, in a futile attempt to preserve the fleeting moment,” Everett narrates.

Cecil Beaton catches up on some news in fab documentary, Love, Cecil (courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archives at Sotheby’s)

A member of Britain’s aristocratic Bright Young Things in the 1920s, Beaton went on to photograph such celebrities as Marilyn Monroe, Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Judy Garland, Sugar Ray Robinson, Mick Jagger, and, perhaps most prominently, Queen Elizabeth and the royal family — and he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind about some of his subjects and acquaintances, saving his finest vitriol for Evelyn Waugh, Noël Coward, Katharine Hepburn, and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. He was taken with patrons Stephen Tennant and Peter Watson, artist and designer Oliver Messel, Olympic fencer Kin Hoitsma, and Greta Garbo, some of whom became his lovers. His tempestuous relationship with Garbo is one of the highlights of the film. Vreeland, cinematographer Shane Sigler, and editor Bernadine Colish maintain a slow, witty, stylish pace, matching Beaton’s general comportment. In addition to home movies, personal photographs, newspaper articles, and archival footage of Beaton on talk shows, the film includes new, revealing interviews with designer Isaac Mizrahi, actors Leslie Caron and Peter Eyre, Vogue international editor at large Hamish Bowles, auctioneer and historian Philippe Garner, model and writer Penelope Tree, Beaton’s sisters Nancy Lady Smiley and Baba Hambro, former museum director Sir Roy Strong, designer Manolo Blahnik, dance critic Alastair Macaulay, interior designer Nicky Haslam, artist David Hockney, and Beaton’s longtime butler, Ray Gurton. There’s a wonderful scene with Diana Vreeland and Truman Capote, and photographer David Bailey gives fabulous insight into his 1971 film, Beaton by Bailey, which Beaton was not very fond of. “There is scarcely a flattering self-portrait, yet truth begins with oneself,” Everett recites from a diary.

“His life was a stage,” notes biographer Hugo Vickers, while photographer Tim Walker explains, “He had a relationship with the idea of the person, not actually the person. There’s truth in fantasy.” Beaton, who redefined fashion layouts while working at Vogue and Vanity Fair, likely would feel right at home in today’s world of selfies and social media, where everyone can create and flaunt their fame. Beaton won four Tonys and three Oscars (including Best Costume Design for the original Broadway production of My Fair Lady and Best Costume Design and Best Art Direction for the movie) and is shown to be both vain and insecure, proud and melancholic, because of and despite his success. Vreeland often cuts to calming shots of Ashcombe House and Reddish House, where Beaton found peace in his garden and with his beloved cat, away from all the hubbub of high society. A splendidly dandy doc, Love, Cecil opens June 29 at the Francesca Beale Theater at Lincoln Center, with Vreeland participating in Q&As after the 7:15 show on June 29 and the 1:15 screening on June 30 (with Sigler) and introducing the 9:45 show on June 29 and the 3:30 screening on June 30.

IRVING PENN: CENTENNIAL

Irving Penn, “Pablo Picasso at La Californie, Cannes, 1957,” platinum-palladium print, 1985 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation / © The Irving Penn Foundation)

Met Fifth Avenue
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gallery 199
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through July 30, $12-$25
212-535-7710
metmuseum.org
www.irvingpenn.org

One of the twentieth century’s most influential and innovative photographers, Irving Penn would have turned one hundred this past June. The Met more than does justice to his legacy in the sparkling exhibition “Irving Penn: Centennial,” continuing at the Met Fifth Avenue through July 30. Both Irving and his younger brother, Arthur, knew how to tell stories visually; while Penn did it through still photography, Arthur was a successful stage and screen director, helming such films as Bonnie and Clyde and The Miracle Worker and such Broadway productions as Wait Until Dark and Golden Boy. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, Irving Penn tried his hand at drawing, painting, and designing before making a name for himself as a fashion photographer at Vogue, shooting 165 covers from 1943 to 2009, when he died at the age of ninety-two. In addition to fashion, Penn photographed celebrities and working people, cigarettes and other trash he found on the street, nudes, flowers, vessels, and people from Dahomey, New Guinea, Peru, and Morocco. The Met show features nearly two hundred photos, arranged in series, that reveal the breadth of Penn’s remarkable ability to capture the essence of his subject with exquisite simplicity while treating them all with equal weight, whether a Hollywood star, an Issey Miyake staircase dress, a muddy glove, a naked body, or a shoe. In a 1939 silver gelatin print, Penn, who did not like being the focus of attention himself, rarely giving interviews and spurning self-portraiture, is seen in shadow, taking a photo of the shadows of a key and a gun on a New York City street. In his Corner Portraits, he asked famous subjects to do whatever they wanted in a makeshift tight corner in his studio, resulting in iconic shots of Marcel Duchamp, Joe Louis, Truman Capote, and Elsa Schiaparelli. In “Balenciaga Sleeve,” model Régine Debrise’s face is starkly cut off at the top of the frame, breaking with tradition. In “Rochas Mermaid Dress,” model Lisa Fonssagrives, Penn’s wife of forty-two years, stands just off-center on a backdrop that Penn doesn’t hide; in fact, the backdrop is on view in the exhibit, along with one of Penn’s Rolleiflex cameras. Penn reveals his experimental side with four prints of “Girl Drinking,” taken of Mary Jane Russell in 1949 but not printed until 1960, 1976, 1977, and 2000, each slightly different.

Irving Penn, “Cigarette No. 37, New York, 1972,” platinum-palladium print, 1975 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation / © The Irving Penn Foundation)

As you make your way through the show, you’ll also come upon pictures of men, women, and children from Cuzco, Peru, including a porter, two Quechuan Indians, and a street vendor wearing multiple hats; a spread-eagled Salvador Dalí; a hand in a white glove holding a black shoe; a color still-life of parts of after-dinner games, with a die, playing cards, a chess horse, and a poker chip; a group of fleshy nudes in which the folds of the bodies form abstract shapes, taken in the 1950s but not printed until 1980 because of pornographic concerns; stunning portraits of Richard Burton, Colette, Pablo Picasso, Ingmar Bergman (with his fingers pressing down on his closed eyes), and Audrey Hepburn; a New Guinea tribesman with a large nose disc; covered women from Morocco; a 1986 color print of a mouth with numerous shades of lipstick, shot for a L’Oreal campaign, that seems to prefigure the main advertising image for Jonathan Demme’s 1991 The Silence of the Lambs,; and even a 1999 ink drawing reminiscent of Morandi. The exhibition also includes a rare video taken by Fonssagrives-Penn showing her husband in Morocco in 1971, shooting portraits in his portable studio. Through it all, Penn never complicates the background, instead focusing on the object itself. “A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart, and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it; it is in one word, ‘effective,’” Penn once said. The Met show, held in conjunction with a promised gift of 187 photographs from the Irving Penn Foundation, accomplishes all that and more.

THE MASTER — PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN: CAPOTE / SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar for his portrayal of Truman Capote

Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar for his intense portrayal of Truman Capote

CAPOTE (Bennett Miller, 2005)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, September 23, $12, 7:00
Series continues through October 2
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.sonyclassics.com

In November 1959, Richard Hickock (Mark Pellegrino) and Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) brutally murdered a Kansas family. After reading a small piece about the killings in the New York Times, New Yorker writer Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman) sets out with his research assistant, Harper “Nell” Lee (Catherine Keener), to cover the story from a unique angle, which soon becomes the workings of the classic nonfiction novel In Cold Blood. Capote tells police chief Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper) right off the bat that he cares only about the story, not what happens to the killers, which does not endear him to the local force. But when the murderers are captured, Capote begins a dangerous relationship with Smith, who comes to think of the writer as a true friend, while Capote gets caught up deeper than he ever thought possible. Based on the exhaustive biography by Gerald Clarke, Capote is a slow-moving character study featuring excellent acting and some interesting surprises, even for those who thought they knew a lot about the party-loving chronicler of high society and high living. Hoffman, who died from a drug overdose in 2014 at the age of forty-six, earned an Oscar for portraying the socialite author, who was played the following year by Toby Jones in Douglas McGrath’s Infamous, which was based on a book by George Plimpton. Capote, which was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Bennett Miller), Best Supporting Actress (Keener), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Dan Futterman), is screening on September 23 in the Museum of the Moving Image series “Philip Seymour Hoffman: The Master,” a sixteen-film tribute to Hoffman, a native New Yorker who left us well before his time. The series continues through October 2 with such Hoffman films as John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt (introduced by Shanley), Todd Solondz’s Happiness, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, and Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Philip Seymour Hoffman doesn’t quite understand what’s happening to him in SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, September 25, $12, 4:00
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.sonyclassics.com

In films such as Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999), Adaptation. (Spike Jonze, 2002), Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (George Clooney, 2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004), writer Charlie Kaufman has created bizarre, compelling alternate views of reality that adventurous moviegoers have embraced, even if they didn’t understand everything they saw. Well, Kaufman has done it again, challenging audiences with his directorial debut, the very strange but mesmerizing Synecdoche, New York. Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as the bedraggled Caden Cotard, a local theater director in Schenectady mounting an inventive production of Death of a Salesman. Just as the show is opening, his wife, avant-garde artist Adele Lack (Catherine Keener), decides to take an extended break in Europe with their four-year-old daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein), and Adele’s kooky assistant, Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh). As Caden starts coming down with a series of unexplainable health problems (his last name, by the way — Cotard — is linked with a neurological syndrome in which a person believes they are dead or dying or do not even exist), he wanders in and out of offbeat personal and professional relationships with box-office girl Hazel (a nearly unrecognizable Samantha Morton), his play’s lead actress, Claire Keen (Michelle Williams), his therapist, Madeleine Gravis (Hope Davis), and Sammy (Tom Noonan), a man who has been secretly following him for years. After winning a MacArthur Genius Grant, Caden begins his grandest production yet, a massive retelling of his life story, resulting in radical shifts between fantasy and reality that will have you laughing as you continually scratch your head, hoping to stimulate your brain in order to figure out just what the heck is happening on-screen. Evoking such films as Federico Fellini’s 8½ and City of Women, Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries as well as the labyrinthine tales of Argentine writers Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, Synecdoche, New York is the kind of work that is likely to become a cult classic over the years, requiring multiple viewings to help understand it all. The film is screening September 25 at the Museum of the Moving Image, with the elusive Charlie Kaufman on hand to talk about working with Hoffman. Four years after the film was released, Hoffman starred in Mike Nichols’s Broadway version of Death of a Salesman, the show his character is putting together in Synecdoche, New York.