Boy, this is a hard movie to talk about. It’s a Charlie Kaufman movie — both written and directed by — so you know it’s aggressively weird. But I actually didn’t know that at first, as it starts off as a kind of mundane, seemingly-realistic movie about a bad marriage, with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener having the kind of tense interactions that are obviously a prelude to a falling out, even as another woman is hitting on Hoffman.

But then, gradually, it starts getting weirder. Hoffman has a series of implausible medical ailments; the woman who’s hitting on Hoffman moves into a house that’s on fire; there’s a guy who’s surreptitiously following Hoffman around and spying on him.

And then it gets really weird, as we gradually segue into a decades-spanning story about Hoffman’s quixotic plans to build a miniature city in a warehouse and put on a sprawling play that recapitulates his life, which of course becomes deeply meta.

But to be clear, the movie isn’t just weird, it’s not doing things just for the sake of confusing the audience or being trippy or whatever. Its surrealism and dream logic and meta reflections are all in the service of a film that’s about something — the movie is deeply interested in death and the question of what matters in life, just not in an obvious or straightforward way.

I’m probably not quite as excited about this movie as Ebert is in this glowing review, but this is genuinely an excellent movie. Highly recommended, and I’ll quote a bit of that Ebert review alongside that recommendation:

This is a film with the richness of great fiction. Like Suttree, the Cormac McCarthy novel I’m always mentioning, it’s not that you have to return to understand it. It’s that you have to return to realize how fine it really is. The surface may daunt you. The depths enfold you. The whole reveals itself, and then you may return to it like a talisman.

Wow, is that ever not a “money review.” Why will people hurry along to what they expect to be trash, when they’re afraid of a film they think may be good?