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Film
Being Spike Jonze
[Photo: Columbia Pictures]
Nicolas Cage plays Charlie Kaufman and his twin brother, Donald, in Adaptation. |
By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published January 9, 2003
Take a book that can't be scripted, a movie that can't be written and a director who can't be conventional, and the result is the dazzling Adaptation.
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Adaptation is a movie about making a movie based upon a book that can't possibly be filmed, looping around that inevitable failure until viewers get dizzy.
Spike Jonze's film also manages to be precisely the esoteric movie based on that book that the movie keeps insisting isn't possible.
That is, until Jonze allows Adaptation to degenerate into exactly the kind of movie that book would become if anyone else in Hollywood made it. The final 30 minutes of Jonze's film is a brilliantly ironic punchline taken too seriously for too long to sustain its punch. Jonze boldly sacrifices his film at the same moment that any screenwriter in his right mind would give up on such an impenetrable project as Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief.
Charlie Kaufman isn't a screenwriter in his right mind: not in real life, where he can devise oddities like this, Being John Malkovich and the upcoming Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and certainly not on screen, where Nicolas Cage plays Kaufman's neurotic vision of himself. Actually, two visions, since Cage also plays Kaufman's twin brother Donald, who doesn't exist yet shares screenwriting credit for Adaptation.
Charlie is the side of Kaufman that wants to capture the nebulous beauty of Orlean's book about rare flowers and an intelligent redneck stealing them from nature preserves. He doesn't want to "ruin it by making it a Hollywood thing like an orchid heist movie or changing the orchids into poppies and turning it into a movie about drug running. I don't want to cram in sex or guns or car chases or characters, you know, learning profound life lessons or growing or coming to like each other or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end."
Donald is the side of Kaufman he's running away from, and who winds up running away with Adaptation, earning his screenwriting credit by taking over the typewriter and turning the film into everything Charlie doesn't want it to be.
Normally, describing such a late development wouldn't be a wise move. But nothing else is normal about Adaptation, so why not? It seems like a public service to warn moviegoers that the movie they think they're watching isn't the movie they'll wind up with unless they're willing to invest a lot of thought and a second viewing to find it.
Being John Malkovich seems positively linear compared with Jonze's breakneck blur of fact, fiction, art, commerce, ego and insecurity. The set of that 1998 mind trip is where Adaptation begins, kind of. Kaufman is at that screenwriter's stage of nervous onlooker, an outcast in his own idea. Jonze zips through his hangdog meeting with a studio executive (Tilda Swinton), who hires him to adapt Orlean's book. Donald suddenly announces he'll be a screenwriter, too, as if that skill were as easy as Charlie knows it isn't.
Flash back to three years earlier when Orlean first tackled The Orchid Thief as a project for the New Yorker magazine. Meryl Streep is superb in a role that goes into much different directions than Orlean did in real life. Did the author really feel so empty in her marriage and career, and did she develop such a relationship with her subject, John Laroche (Chris Cooper)? Probably not. Orlean deserves a good sport award for allowing Kaufman so much creative license.
Then the movie delves into its richest material, as Laroche's flinty personality both repels and attracts Orlean and completely frustrates Charlie in his effort to keep his adapted screenplay pure. Meanwhile, Donald is breezing through his script, a hackneyed thriller absurdly titled The 3, featuring every cliche in the book, or at least in the courses taught by a self-inflated writer (Brian Cox), based on real-life instructor Robert McKee.
Subplots are exclusively the plot of Adaptation, shuffled with the frantic precision of a writer beating his block. It's a daring experiment that will frustrate some viewers, especially when those subplots become moot in the final act, just when we're getting comfortable with the filmmakers' criss-cross style.
In some regards, their chutes-and-ladders approach to Adaptation serves the film well. Cage's cagey handling of the dual role with only slight body language and a half-octave could get old in a conventional format. Streep's ability to transform herself into various shadings of the same loneliness is made stronger by the fact that she has to be convincing in increments, not as a chronological whole. Inside jokes aren't so inside after awhile.
The lone constant in Adaptation is Cooper's memorable performance as Laroche, whose missing front teeth and Cracker twang mark him as a hick until you listen to his words. Laroche is the smartest person he knows, with enough facts and gumption to make anyone believe it. Not even Donald can make him any more eccentric than he is. "I think I should play me," Laroche says when Orlean mentions a movie deal. Watching Cooper gum the scenery, plus knowing what tricksters Jonze and Kaufman are, makes one believe he already did.
Adaptation
- Grade: A-
- Director: Spike Jonze
- Cast: Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Tilda Swinton, Brian Cox, Judy Greer, Maggie Gyllenhaal
- Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman, loosely based on the novel The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean
- Rating: R; profanity, sexual situations, drug abuse, violence, brief nudity
- Running time: 114 min.
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