Admittedly this was not an easy film to enjoy. Much of it is tedious, and the occasional surreal touches serve to make it claustrophobic. Many critics contest whether it even succeeds as entertainment; the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle goes so far as to say that although SNY “makes us confront both the cruelties of existence and the harsh and uncompromising laws of narrative art,” it fails because it aimed too high. Ultimately I disagree. The low hanging fruit of Hollywood’s garden variety blockbuster doesn’t often appeal to me. As excruciating as I found large swathes of this film, it made me explore and confront. Unlike others who found the last half more painful than the first, I didn’t get SNY until the last half and particularly after the speech of Dianne Wiest’s Caden to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Caden: “As the people who adore you stop adoring you, as they die, as they move on, as you shed them, as you shed your beauty, your youth, as the world forgets you, as you recognize your transience, as you begin to lose your characteristics, one by one, as you learn there is no one watching and there never was, [you’re]… not coming from any place, not arriving any place, just counting on time. [You die, then] you are gone.” He reflects back that “everyone’s dreams… all those apartments… all those thoughts – we’ll never know what’s the truth of it.” I can’t recall any other film that attempted to capture this in this way. Kaufman did fail on some level, but this particular failure replicates life itself and thus succeeds, but it’s not for the faint of heart.