The erudite title, when pronounced correctly, is an obvious play, not to say a meaningful play, on Schenectady, New York, the main setting of the film, where a regional stage director of high pretension and acute hypochondria gets left behind by his wing-spreading painter wife and their young daughter, then gets a MacArthur Fellowship — the “Genius Grant” — freeing him to reconstruct his life in a neverending work-in-progress inside a cavernous brick warehouse. In short — and it’s a challenge to keep it short — this is one of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s ongoing explorations of the human mind (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), except that for the first time he is also the director, a recipe for self-indulgence if not megalomania. The early mundanities (perusing the paper at the breakfast table: “Harold Pinter died. No, wait. He won the Nobel Prize”) are often amusing, thanks in large part to the infectious dyspepsia of Philip Seymour Hoffman, heading a cast of indie all-stars: Catherine Keener, Hope Davis, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dianne Wiest, Emily Watson. But the narrative soon goes irretrievably off the rails, smashing through barriers of time and space, soaring off into fancy and obscurity, and viewers one by one are apt to be dropping by the wayside and waving at the film to go on without them. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd