It died sometime around 2008, though it had been sick for much longer. The belief that if a person worked hard enough, honestly enough, obsessively enough, they could build something that contained everything. Every feeling. Every person. Every room. Every lie told in every room. Every flicker of light on every wall of every room in which every lie was told.

It died in a warehouse in Manhattan. It died in a film called Synecdoche, New York. And its death was the most extraordinary thing it ever did.

The man who killed it, or who filmed its death, was Charlie Kaufman. He had spent a career writing about people who try to crawl inside their own heads and find something true. Being John Malkovich. Adaptation. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Each of those films was a comedy about the impossibility of knowing yourself. Synecdoche, New York was the tragedy. It was Kaufman’s first film as a director. It felt like it might also be his last, not because he would stop making films, but because there was nowhere further to go.

The man at the center is Caden Cotard, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. His name is a diagnosis. Cotard’s delusion is the clinical belief that you are already dead. Caden is a theater director in Schenectady, a city whose name sounds like “synecdoche,” which is a figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole. The title tells you everything. A part trying to stand for the whole. A man trying to build a whole world from the part of it he can see.

Caden wins a MacArthur Fellowship. A genius grant. Unlimited money, unlimited time. His wife, Adele, is a painter. She makes paintings so small you need a magnifying glass to see them. She is making art that shrinks. He is about to make art that swallows the world. She takes their daughter, Olive, and moves to Berlin. He lets them go. He was already somewhere else.

He rents a warehouse in Manhattan. He begins to build.

At first, the project makes a kind of sense. He will stage a play about real life. Actors will play real people. The sets will be faithful reproductions of real apartments, real streets, real hospitals. Everything will be honest. Nothing will be faked. The play will be the most truthful thing ever produced on a stage.

Then the warehouse gets bigger.

He builds a replica of his own apartment inside the warehouse. Then a replica of the warehouse inside the warehouse. Then actors to play the actors who are playing the real people. A man named Sammy has been following Caden for years. Caden hires him to play Caden. Sammy is better at being Caden than Caden is. This does not surprise anyone, least of all Caden. We are all understudies in our own lives.

Years pass. The warehouse grows. It contains city blocks now. It contains weather. Caden walks through his reproduction of the world and gives direction. More honest. More real. Closer to the truth. The actors age. Caden ages faster. His body is failing in ways that doctors describe with increasing alarm and decreasing clarity. Lesions. Seizures. A condition that makes his tears into a sticky paste. His body is becoming as cluttered and unmanageable as his art.

He never opens the play. There is no opening night. There cannot be. The play is not a play anymore. It is a life, and lives do not have opening nights. They have only rehearsals, and then they end.

Hazel, the woman Caden loves but cannot hold, lives in a house that is on fire. The house is literally, visibly burning. Smoke leaks from the windows. Flames are visible behind the walls. She bought it this way. She lives in it for decades. The fire never goes out and the house never collapses. Nobody in the film comments on this. It is simply a fact. Love is a house on fire and you move in anyway and you die of smoke inhalation in your eighties and you were happy, or you were not, and the fire was always there.

Kaufman does not explain. Kaufman never explains. The film operates on dream logic, but not the convenient kind. Not the kind where you wake up and say, “Oh, it was just a dream.” The kind where the dream is more coherent than waking life because it doesn’t pretend that things make sense.

Caden’s daughter Olive grows up in Berlin without him. When he finally sees her, she is an adult, tattooed, dying. She believes he abandoned her. She is right. He chose the warehouse. He chose the replica. He chose the part over the whole, and the whole went on without him.

Late in the film, Caden stops directing. An actress playing a cleaning woman named Ellen begins giving him instructions through an earpiece. Walk here. Sit there. Say this. He obeys. He becomes a character in someone else’s version of his life. He becomes the thing he spent decades trying to create: a person fully directed, fully scripted, fully contained.

The last direction is simple.

Die.

He does.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden with a quietness that is almost physically painful to watch. He does not rage. He does not grandstand. He shuffles. He squints. He speaks in a voice that sounds like it’s apologizing for existing. It is one of the great performances in American cinema, and it is a performance about the failure of performance, which is a paradox that Hoffman inhabits with total grace. He died in 2014. He was forty-six. The loss is not something you get over. You just build a bigger warehouse around it.

Roger Ebert called Synecdoche, New York the best film of the 2000s. He was probably right. It is also the saddest. Not sad in the way that films about illness or loss are sad. Sad in the way that looking at a photograph of yourself from twenty years ago is sad. Sad in the way that realizing you will never finish the thing you started is sad. Sad in the way that knowing you are going to die, and that no amount of art or love or effort will prevent it, is sad.

It is sad in the way that life is sad, which is to say: not always, not even mostly, but underneath everything, quietly, like a house that is always on fire.

This film is peculiar because it attempts something that should be impossible. It tries to contain all of human experience in two hours and four minutes. It fails. That failure is the most honest thing American cinema has produced in this century. It fails the way we all fail: with ambition, with love, with too many rooms and not enough time.

Go see it. You won’t understand all of it. You shouldn’t. Understanding it completely would mean Kaufman succeeded, and the whole point is that he can’t. The whole point is that nobody can.

Rest in peace, the idea that art could hold all of life. You were beautiful. You were doomed. You were the only thing worth trying.

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Synecdoche, New York Directed by Charlie Kaufman United States, 2008 | 124 minutes