Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Theater director Caden Cotard is mounting a new play. His life catering to suburban blue-hairs at the local regional theater in Schenectady, New York is looking bleak. His wife Adele has left him to pursue her painting in Berlin, taking their young daughter Olive with her. His therapist, Madeleine Gravis, is better at plugging her best-seller than she is at counseling him. A new relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel has prematurely run aground. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one. Worried about the transience of his life, he leaves his home behind. He gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in New York City, hoping to create a work of brutal honesty. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a growing mockup of the city outside. The years rapidly fold into each other, and Caden buries himself deeper into his masterpiece, but the textured tangle of real and theatrical relationships blurs the line between the world of the play and that of Caden's own deteriorating reality.

Kaufman’s films have always been a bit bizarre and surreal but I don’t think anything has come close to this. Making his directorial debut, this film follows the life of Caden Cotard, a man obsessed with his own death and struggling to find his masterpiece with a local theater troop. The film skips around a lot and is dense with characters and timelines. While this makes things interesting in a way, it also makes it hard to follow at times. Typical of a Kaufman story, there are a lot of abstract visuals that sometimes make sense, but at times leave you scratching your head. Ultimately this didn’t impress nearly as much as some of his previous works.

Sony’s transfers have been getting so good lately it almost seems pointless to review them. Everything is solid here. Detail is exquisite in medium to close up shots and even longer shots have a nice resolve to them. Color saturation is very natural and at times has a stylized undersaturated quality to them. Contrast levels are strong but blacks are slightly elevated. Fine object detail is excellent and depth of image is impressive throughout. A strong presentation for a visually rich film from Sony.

The TrueHD soundtrack is good and has a very nice spatial quality but this isn’t an overly dynamic mix. It does have some nice nuance to it though and the imaging across all channels is impressive given the genre. Dialogue sounds good with only some minor strain noticed from time to time. Surrounds do a great job with the soundtrack and offer a modest amount of directional effects and a strong sense of atmosphere and space.

Sony includes some production features that give an inside look at the making of the film and the rich cast and storyline. There is also an interview with Hoffman and an interesting class study with Kaufman.

This one just didn’t grab me nearly as much as previous films based on Kaufman’s scripts. But it seems there are some really mixed reviews for this one as it is so fans of his works should definitely give this one a look. Sony has done a brilliant job with the presentation, which just seems to be par for the course with them.