“Every one one of us is hurtling towards death,”theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) rapturously announces to a room full of hushed actors sitting with blank stares and crossed arms, beginning the grand experimental project that will become, in more ways than one, his life’s work. It’s as close to a punchline as we get in Charlie Kauffman’s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York.