Review

Review Date: 19-January-03
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Juicy

Adaptation (2002)

Although "Adaptation" is in many ways a movie after my own heart, it appealed no less to my brain; this is one of those rare films which caused me to think long and hard about its structure and purpose well after I had left the theater. (Indeed, this is the only review I have written to date that was composed in part at 2:40 in the morning.) Ostensibly a brutal act of self-dissection by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, it is really an incredibly clever, philosophical, and artistic work which uses the twin concepts of real life and dramatic life to illustrate the necessity for evolution in personal human experience.

After his success with "Being John Malkovich" a few years back, Kaufman was hired to adapt the best-selling nonfiction book, "The Orchid Thief," for a movie. What he came up with is "Adaptation" (also directed by Spike Jonze), which tells the story of a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman who is hired to write the script version of "The Orchid Thief" and ends up inserting himself into the story. This cinematic reflection of real life thus concerns not only the book's author, Susan Orlean, and her interaction with an orchid fanatic, but also Kaufman himself — his neuroses and weaknesses and, ultimately, how he learns to start moving beyond them. Nicolas Cage gives a wonderful performance as Kaufman, a neurotic, lonely geek with zero self-confidence who is deeply moved by the work he sets out to cinematize and wants to stay as faithful to it as possible. To him, this means telling a "true" story about flowers instead of making a standard movie about people having life-altering experiences, falling in love, engaging in sex and drugs and murder, etc. However, he has no idea how to make a film about beauty in which nothing changes, so he falls into the throes of serious melancholy and writer's block. Exacerbating his frustration is his inability to generate a romance with his friend Amelia (Cara Seymour) and the fact that his (entirely fictional) twin brother Donald, an outgoing, happy-go-lucky buffoon also played by Cage, is working on his own screenplay, an absurd concoction of all the contrived Hollywood things that Charlie hates. In flashbacks, we also see Orlean (Meryl Streep) as she travels to Florida to interview her subject, John Laroche (the always fabulous Chris Cooper, here outdoing himself). Laroche is a strange mix of Southern hick, shrewd businessman, and startling intellect, with the overarching trait of passion — on any given day in his life, there is something which utterly fascinates him and defines his existence. Not surprisingly, this has an enormous effect on Orlean, whose life is comfortable but lacks any ardent purpose or emotion.

The first two thirds of the film seem like a fairly straightforward narrative of what (may have) actually happened when Orlean met Laroche, and when Charlie Kaufman sat down to work on "The Orchid Thief" (with the presence of Donald, Charlie's alter ego, always hinting at the underlying current of psychological introspection). The final third leaves the path of near realism and seems to plunge into the swamp of Hollywood-style drama and excess, complete with love, sex, drugs, and attempted murder. Although at first sight the end of the movie appears a bit out of hand, as an elaborate metaphor it makes perfect sense. What Charlie Kaufman has done is to graft a story about the lack of change — associated not with the beauty of flowers but with the painful stasis of a blocked, hopeless man living in the thrall of fear and self-loathing — onto the very elements of traditional Hollywood films which the character of Charlie disdains. In so doing, he melds two concepts — screenwriting (the telling of a meaningful story) and successful human existence (the living of a meaningful story) — to create an acceptably cinematic metaphor for his own self (or at least the self he offers for general consumption). By injecting his own persona, Kaufman brings the flavor of truth to his depiction of the monumental upheaval, akin to death, that evolution entails, and how crucial it is for himself (and all living things) to inch toward a better stage of existence. "Adaptation," therefore, is not so much personal as profound, and it virtually teems with the meaty stuff of life — passion, love, fear, death, art, and longing. Thanks to Charlie Kaufman, whoever he really may be, American cinema is not brain dead yet.

[Note: If you have a chance, check out the poster for "Adaptation" and note the font of the title, in which the initial "A" is clearly delineated, but the other letters become progressively messier. Brilliant!]

Copyright © 2003 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.