WhatzUp

Adaptation
by Derek Neff

Nicholas Cage plays screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (and Kaufman’s less talented but more boisterous twin brother Donald) in this wildly inventive movie about, well, how a wildly inventive movie called Adaptation by Charlie Kaufman came to be written.

After being hired to write the screenplay adaptation of Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief, Kaufman finds himself severely blocked by the book’s discursive structure, by Hollywood’s expectations for what makes a “good” (i.e., marketable) movie, by his brother’s parallel attempts to write a hackneyed screenplay involving a serial killer and most of all by his own insecurities as a writer and a human.

Interspersed with Kaufman’s story is the story of the orchid thief himself, John Laroche (Chris Cooper), an eccentric man with no front teeth who lives and breathes to find the elusive and beautiful ghost orchid. Susan Orleans (Meryl Streep) is the New Yorker writer who follows Laroche around, ostensibly to get the story, but also because she finds herself envious of Laroche’s ability to be passionately devoted to something other than himself. I’m not sure how Orleans feels about having the adaptation of her book come out in this distorted, oblique way, but I can’t help but think she’d be pleased, given the wise, fascinating passages of the book that are included.

Any further attempt to synopsize Adaptation in a capsule review would be pure folly. It’s not that the action is so complex and “out there” as to be confusing or inaccessible; on the contrary, Adaptation is easy to follow (and is very, very funny to boot). It’s just that so many rich surprises await you if you know as little going in as possible.

Director Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich) delights in mixing fact with fiction, cannibalizing bits of actual lives for purposes of outrageous fabulation, but he never does this merely for the sake of being gimmicky. This was true with Being John Malkovich, and it is especially true in Adaptation, which might surprise many viewers for its deep meditation on the search for passion in our lives.

The movie’s overblown climax might seem to be a disappointingly precipitous decline into the very type of movie that Kaufman is trying to avoid, but that is the very point, I think. (After all, doesn’t Kaufman enlist his fictitious brother to help him finish the arguably unfinishable adaptation?) At what appears to be the dumbest part of the movie, we are slyly exposed to the smartest and subtlest switcheroo of all.