Review: 'Synecdoche, New York'

" Synecdoche, New York," screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's wildly ambitious directorial debut, recalls the Jorge Luis Borges story in which the imperial cartographers make a map of the empire so detailed and true-to-life that it takes on the exact dimensions of the territory and ends up covering it entirely. Jean Baudrillard famously inverted the story to illustrate his idea about the "precession of simulacra," a postmodern condition in which the representation of something comes before the thing it represents, breaking down the distinction between representation and reality completely.

By CARINA CHOCANO

October 24, 2008