I know – I’ll start out with the name of the movie and what it’s about. But I have to be careful not to give anything away. Hey, I shouldn’t be so hard on myself: I’m always careful about it, but people complain about it anyway. That’s their problem, not mine. Okay. So:)
Adaptation is the new movie from bizarro screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze of Being John Malkovich fame. (What a pathetic opening! No one’s going to want to read this. Okay, just get something down on paper and fix it later. Keep going.) It’s based on… well, pretty much on Charlie Kaufman himself, in his struggle to translate Susan Orleans’ book The Orchid Thief into a script. Trouble is, the book has a skimpy story and is rife with musings on botanical history, why people are so attracted to flowers, the joys and dangers of obsessions, and other uncinematic passages. Plus, Charlie (Nicolas Cage) feels uncomfortable adapting someone else’s work, partly because he’s altering another writer’s pride and joy, and partly, he decides, because “I have no knowledge of anything beyond my own panic and self-loathing” (which sounds like something that should be embroidered on a pillow in my home).
(Should I say here how much I enjoyed the film, that it’s hilarious, playful, creative, sly? I should say that I liked it so my readers don’t have to go too far to find that out. But that breaks up the flow I’ve got going. Okay, just write it; fix it later.)
Charlie insists that he won’t “Hollywoodize” The Orchid Thief, but how can he script a book in which not much happens? While he’s struggling with this, in one of the sharpest depictions of writer’s block I’ve seen, his twin brother Donald (Nicolas Cage) decides on a whim to get rich by writing a screenplay (in the process going against every cinematic principle Charlie holds dear). You can guess which brother succeeds first.
(Shit, I’m giving too much away! No, I’m not – that’s not even half the story. That’s what you’d read on the back of a DVD box. That’s nothing. And the story isn’t even the point in this movie. But people will think it’s giving stuff away, and they’re going to stop reading and intend to come back and read it after they see the movie, but they never will. They. Never. Will.)
(Fuck ‘em.)
Interwoven with Charlie’s trials is The Orchid Thief’s skeletal story: author Orleans (Meryl Streep) develops a rapport with orchid thief John Laroche so she can write about his unusual life and occupation for The New Yorker. As Laroche, Chris Cooper (almost unrecognizable) is outstanding, by far the best performance in the film. Laroche is the epitome of the charming rogue. Funny and charismatic, his layered character defies your initial impression: though he breaks laws cavalierly and looks like an extra from Deliverance, he’s also a gentle, slightly sad enthusiast who collects, in a sense, collections and becomes a self-taught expert in each field for as long as it interests him. Cooper won me from the start with his sly, easy-going performance, mostly played for laughs but far from a caricature. But he really shows his talent when Laroche begins to reveal the emotions under his devil-may-care exterior.
Streep, unfortunately, slows the movie down every time she’s on screen. I guess I should be grateful that much of her on-screen time is shared with Cooper; otherwise, she’d have been deadly. It’s not entirely her fault – she has to do too much voice-over, and with her drowsy, almost emotionless speech, the movie has to drag through molasses to reach the next scene. But she’s not impressive even when she’s acting instead of narrating. Maybe Kaufman didn’t develop Orlean enough as a character, or maybe Streep just wasn’t the right choice.
As Charlie and Donald, Cage is entertaining. Though the two characters aren’t physically distinguished from each other (they even have the same hairstyle!), you can tell who’s who thanks to Cage’s sunny, wide-eyed Donald, always eager to please, and his anxiety-ridden, self-loathing Charlie, who compacts himself into a ball of tortured nerves and self-flagellation.
(This device is probably starting to get really annoying. But this is how the movie is, so they ought to know that if they find this irritating, the movie’s probably not going to please them. Except that Charlie Kaufman is a much better and funnier writer than I am, so maybe they wouldn’t find it annoying when he does it.)
The self-referential idea of a movie about a writer struggling to write the script that becomes the movie you’re watching is almost brilliantly simple, and Kaufman and Jonze execute it well. It’s so meta, it’s mega-meta (I thought “meta” had to be a prefix, but I just saw it used as an adjective in a major publication). (That was so liberating! Now I can just say “meta” instead of explaining shit or trying to think of words, and let them figure it out.) The Möbius strips of self-reference are dizzying sometimes; witness Nicolas Cage, in a movie Charlie Kaufman wrote, playing Charlie Kaufman musing that he’d like to be played by Gerard Depardieu in the movie of the script he is currently writing.
I had a big ol’ smile on my face throughout most of the movie; it’s the kind of film that makes you glad to just to be watching it. Compared to multiplex dreck, Adaptation is dazzling, if for nothing else than its brazen mockery of cinematic convention. Kaufman gleefully rips the Hollywood formula to shreds, which was particularly refreshing after seeing Die Another Day, which was constrained by formula. It’s just a tiny facet of the joke that Kaufman puts himself in the center of the movie when screenwriters are notoriously slighted and disrespected in Hollywood. In fact, Adaptation boldly spends most of its time on the creative process, which would seem unfilmable (or rather, filmable, but painfully dull and impenetrable). As in Being John Malkovich, we’re in Charlie’s head, but this time in his brain rather than his skull. It may sound like an overly cute gimmick of a movie, and it is clever on the surface – but in deeper layers as well.
Speaking of Malkovich, the stars of that movie make witty cameos – as themselves, filming Being John Malkovich. (As surreal as that film was, it’s even more surreal seeing actors wearing John Malkovich masks strolling around a studio lot, completely out of context.) I’m a little bit in awe that Kaufman’s subjects let him use their real names and abuse their characters. Kaufman cultivates his image as a reclusive freak (he doesn’t do interviews and won’t allow photos of himself to be published), but he’s got to have some kind of charm to get John Malkovich and Susan Orlean to agree to roles that really fuck with their images.
Kaufman treads a fine line with his ending; I think there’s a pretty good chance that a lot of the audience won’t get what he’s doing. A good part of the people in my screening didn’t seem to catch on. But if you know you’re in on the joke (and others aren’t), it makes the movie that much more enjoyable. Thinking about Adaptation and what it demands of – and offers – its viewers, I remembered a passage from The Conversations, a terrific compilation by Michael Ondaatje of his discussions with legendary film and sound editor Walter Murch on the art of editing as well as many other topics. It certainly gave me a much better understanding of what an editor does and how it can affect the finished product. I highly recommend it if you’re interested in that kind of thing; it’s like Visions of Light for editors (and in book form). Anyway, part of what Murch says (the full quote is here) is, “If a film can provoke the audience’s participation – if the film gives a certain amount of information but requires the audience to complete the ideas, then it engages each member of the audience as a creative participant in the work.” And this, of course, makes a person feel like the film is speaking directly to her or him.
Adaptation
engages you as a creative participant, and maybe that’s
the most important difference between it and 90% of the movies
currently
showing, and the best way to recommend it. I can tell you it’s
funny,
it’s playful, it’s inventive, but maybe most notable is how it connects
you with Charlie Kaufman, not just as a character in a movie, but as a
creator.
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