At the movies: Synecdoche, New York.

The short version: unfinished pluperfect subjunctive, four stars.

The not-so-short version: ripples on the surface of a lake cannot be unmade. The point of injury/trauma can be mended, but any true healing will always continue on the heels of that which has already spread outward. Something broken cannot be fixed to be like it was- it is something different, something made new out of brokenness.

It angers me how playful the film plays at being, even as it wounds so very deliberately.

I am not a psychiatrist. I am not a surgeon. I cannot make this film better, despite the countless thousands of words I have written over the past ten years doing, or trying to do, exactly that for countless other films.

I do not fully comprehend aspects of this film.

Small acts of forgiveness, then. The absence of control. The body in revolt. There's something distinctly Cronenbergian afoot; perhaps this was the natural Brundlefly fruition of the Cronenbergian process given theatrical form, rather than the maligned opera of The Fly that I still desperately would love to see.

I will now never be able to meet Dianne Wiest without sobbing incoherently.

I've always said that part of me is still walking through the desert in Van Sant's Gerry. And as with that film, I feel I haunt this one.