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From David Edelstein in New York Magazine:

There’s something appealingly anti-psychological about Charlie Kaufman. As a Jew who explores the inner lives of anxious neurotic depressive solipsists, he could be expected to build his works around repressed traumas and cathartic revelations: very Freudian, very twentieth century. But Kaufman goes in the opposite direction. The whirlpool doesn’t circle in on painful personal truths—it moves outward, in ever-widening spirals, until identity is swallowed up by larger forces.

… Kaufman contrives to display even more permutations of the self, on the way to the self’s dissolution. This epic dream play with its leaps through time and space, its characters and shadow characters, poses a momentous question: Uh … well … I’m not sure what question the movie is posing. The answer, though, is definitely “Death.”

From Manohla Dargis in The New York Times:

To say that Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now. That at least would be an appropriate response to a film about failure, about the struggle to make your mark in a world filled with people who are more gifted, beautiful, glamorous and desirable than the rest of us — we who are crippled by narcissistic inadequacy, yes, of course, but also by real horror, by zits, flab and the cancer that we know (we know!) is eating away at us and leaving us no choice but to lie down and die.

Despite its slippery way with time and space and narrative and Mr. Kaufman’s controlled grasp of the medium, “Synecdoche, New York” is as much a cry from the heart as it is an assertion of creative consciousness. It’s extravagantly conceptual but also tethered to the here and now, which is why, for all its flights of fancy, worlds within worlds and agonies upon agonies, it comes down hard for living in the world with real, breathing, embracing bodies pressed against other bodies. To be here now, alive in the world as it is rather than as we imagine it to be, seems a terribly simple idea, yet it’s also the only idea worth the fuss, the anxiety of influence and all the messy rest, a lesson hard won for Caden. Life is a dream, but only for sleepers.

From Carina Chocano in The LA Times:

…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.

No doubt Kaufman, the brilliant, melancholy and unrepentantly solipsistic mind behind “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Adaptation,” had both in mind when he outlined the contours of his sprawling, awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, frustrating, hard-to-follow and achingly, achingly sad movie, which might have just as well have been called “Being Charlie Kaufman” or, better yet, “Being Anybody.”

What is going on with Caden? Is he sick? Crazy? Dying? Already dead? Pretty much all of the above, though not in the usual sense. Kaufman is trying to do what Caden is trying to do; he’s trying to make sense of loss, longing and death. He’s mining all the sadness in the world. As for happiness, he’s suspicious. It’s a sham product sold by a huckster (Hope Davis, as his therapist and bestselling self-help author). He’s marveling at the struggle and the longing, multiplied by the billions, in the face of futility. He’s having an existential freakout on an epic scale.

Hoffman commits himself completely to Caden’s mournfulness, to the sadness that comes with realizing, as he does in the end, as what was once “an exciting, mysterious future” recedes into the past, “that this is everyone’s experience, every single one; that you are not special; that there is no one watching you and there never was.” This sounds hopeless — too hopeless, even, for some of the characters in the film, who chafe at Caden’s vision. There’s beauty everywhere — in the transporting score by Jon Brion, in Hoffman and Morton’s performances, in Adele’s paintings (actually the miniaturized paintings of an artist named Alex Kanevsky), in the fact that we struggle in the face of futility, that as Caden tells his actors, we simultaneously fear and don’t believe in death. That the house is on fire from the day you buy it. That the house is never not on fire.

And a less indulgent view from Anthony Lane in The New Yorker:

Well, there are three commonplaces on which it repeatedly riffs. One is what you might call the romantic-pathetic theory of imagination: any alternative reality that we design and furnish, when we conceive a work of art, is always to some extent a stand-in for the puny or pitiful one that we have been personally landed with. The second and most imperishable truth is: we grow old, and perish. And the third says: all you need is love. These are noble principles to pursue; unless the pursuit is waged with gusto, however, it threatens to slump into the sententious, and that is what happens here. With so much screen time being allotted to Caden’s bad marriage and pustular health problems, his majestic production doesn’t get going properly until the second half of the film, and by then we don’t care enough (worse still, we don’t know enough, such is the vagueness of its guiding rubric) to mind whether it triumphs or flops. Compare Dennis Potter’s great mini-series of the nineteen-eighties, “The Singing Detective,” and you will see much the same setup—a wry leading man with a skin disease, inspired by a furious creative itch—rendered with unstinting vigor. And, should you still have a taste for the fancies of a fading man, try Orson Welles’s “The Immortal Story,” or a little picture of his called “Citizen Kane,” all of which, I sometimes think, could be floating within Kane’s cranium, like snow inside a globe. In each case, there is joy—not just a mournful snickering, as carried in Charlie Kaufman’s bag of tricks, but the breath of divine pleasure—in the conjuring of dreams. If you want to show a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, go right ahead, but give that hour all the life you can.