The draw was David Thewlis and Toni Collette, who do their best with the heavily referential material. There's little here if you don't get Kaufman's gestures, which may be erudite but demonstrate little insight on his part. Some of the references are expanded inline — even without reading her I was sure that movie review was Pauline Kael's — so lazily that it reeks of plagiarism. The point may be that we're deep into derivative, attention-deprived culture now, where knowingness is enough; there is no further need for innovation, explanation, the expansion of human thought and experience, for if there were, Kaufman would be doing that. The best parts are probably in the footnotes, or on the cutting room floor, or in the source novel.
Reviews from Michael Wood and A. O. Scott should have warned me off.