I don’t consider myself an especially confident person. I’m self-conscious in public. I sometimes convince myself I have no talent. I’m scared of dying. These are all traits that describe Caden Cotard, the theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Kaufman’s new movie Synecdoche, New York. These are also traits, I’m sure, that plague a great many of us. So why did I spend the entire movie feeling so distant from Caden?

I’m still trying to piece that together myself. Calling Kaufman’s movie ambitious is an understatement — it’s an exploration of not only Caden’s entire life but the inside of his mind as well. We’re supposed to walk away from the movie pondering some Big Questions within the context of this guy’s world. But all I felt was confused and depressed.

Kaufman wrote and directed Synecdoche, and if you’re familiar with his earlier writing — Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — you know you’re in for something meta or post-modernist or off-the-deep-end or, well, Kaufmanesque. The story in Synecdoche is at first straightforward: we meet Caden, his distant wife Adele (Catherine Keener) and his young daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein). He’s putting on a production of Death of a Salesman and has a little crush on the theater receptionist, Hazel (Samantha Morton).

Then the unhappy Adele takes off to Europe with Olive. Caden is at first depressed but is reinvigorated when he gets a MacArthur grant to put on a play and decides to create the biggest theatrical work ever. That’s when things go down the rabbit hole, or off the deep end, or wherever they go.

His big idea: get a bunch of actors together in a really big warehouse and basically build a life-size replica of New York City for them to live out their lives in and see what kind of theatrical brilliance comes out of it. He eventually decides to focus on his own life and brings the people in his own life — particularly Hazel and a smitten young actress named Claire (Michelle Williams), who eventually becomes his second wife — to act out their lives in the warehouse. But since their lives now consist of acting out their lives in a warehouse, smaller warehouses are built inside the bigger one for them to “go to work” in, Caden hires an actor to play himself, and other actors are hired to play the roles of the other people. Soon everyone’s walking around with one or two doppelgangers.

Assuming that paragraph made any sense at all, let me ask: did none of them realize they could go on forever like that? It’s like looking into a mirror when there’s also a mirror behind you.

If my description didn’t make