director
Spike Jonze
screenwriters
Charlie
Kaufman
Donald Kaufman
based on the
book The Orchid Thief by
Susan
Orlean
producers
Jonathan Demme
Edward Saxon
Vincent Landay
cinematographer
Lance Acord
music
Carter Burwell
editor
Eric Zumbrunnen
cast
Nicolas Cage (Charlie/Donald)
Meryl Streep (Susan Orlean)
Chris Cooper (John Laroche)
Brian Cox (Robert McKee)
Maggie Gyllenhaal (Caroline)
Tilda Swinton (Valerie)
Cara Seymour (Amelia)
Curtis Hanson (Susan's Husband)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 114m
u.s.
release: December 6,
2002
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official website
other spike
jonze films
reviewed on this website:
- being
john malkovich
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Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's
Adaptation is a snake eating its own tail. That's an expression
used in the movie; so is "deus ex machina," which pretty
well describes the ending. Kaufman has written an adaptation
of Susan Orlean's nonfiction book The Orchid Thief in
which Kaufman writes himself into an adaptation of The Orchid
Thief. The movie becomes about writers -- not just Charlie
Kaufman, but his fictional twin brother Donald (who goes into
screenwriting and has much more of an affinity for movie conventions
than Charlie does) and Susan Orlean (who travels to Florida to
cover orchid thief John Laroche and gets caught up in his passion
for his "work"). These writers -- all writers
-- mutate their material according to their own drives and demons.
Adaptation is possibly without peer as a study of the
act of creation as a shaky, hapless endeavor -- an act of narcissism,
in which the writer leaves his footprints all over the work until
the footprints become the work.
The movie's adaptation of The
Orchid Thief has very little to do with The Orchid Thief,
and the movie's Charlie Kaufman -- pudgy, balding -- is quite
unlike the actual Kaufman, a thin man with a thick head of hair.
Kaufman's self-deprecating projection of himself -- the blubbery,
sweaty geek he may see himself as in dark moments -- is played
with annihilating over-the-top misery by Nicolas Cage, who makes
high entertainment out of self-loathing. (The performance is
the flip side of Cage's work in Leaving
Las Vegas.) With the help of ingenious visual effects
-- far smoother than those seen in Dead Ringers or even
Multiplicity
just six years ago -- Cage also plays the twin Donald, a cheerier
fellow who looks just like Charlie but doesn't let that stop
him. Donald's head is full of Great Ideas for movies -- like
The 3, a multiple-personality thriller that sounds just
awful enough to be plausible. Donald can be taken on a few levels:
he's the standard-issue "opposite twin" or "evil
twin" (Donald isn't evil, really, but the resentful Charlie
may see him as such for his ease with the ladies and his comfort
with formula screenwriting); he's the part of Kaufman's brain
that nags him to do something more accessible; he's the confident
mirror image Kaufman may wish he could turn on and off. The movie
is really Being Charlie Kaufman, in which we enter Kaufman's
head for two hours.
Why The Orchid Thief?
Why Susan Orlean? Charlie, like Kaufman (for the sake of simplicity
I will refer to the movie's Charlie Kaufman as Charlie and the
real Kaufman as Kaufman), falls in love with Orlean's writing;
something about it touches him -- maybe a bit of inchoate sadness
(Kaufman has a Native American in the movie commenting that he
can see the sadness in Susan's eyes). Meryl Streep plays Susan
-- emphatically a not-really-Susan-Orlean -- as a yearning city
woman who wishes she could feel passionate about something. Everything
is a subject to her, a thing to be written, not an experience
to be lived. When she meets John Laroche (Chris Cooper in a happily
atypical, slobby redneck performance), she sees what she's been
missing. John gets gung-ho about things -- turtles, fish -- and
then one day decides to discard them. His current thing is orchids,
which he hopes to clone and sell for big money; later his thing
will be Internet porn using photos of topless local women. Susan
doesn't really have a thing -- she writes about other people's
things (like, for instance, female
surfers). Charlie, straining to adapt Susan's thing, must
feel a kinship, though he shrinks from meeting her. He sexualizes
Susan the way she sexualizes John.
Adaptation chugs along on parallel tracks for
a while -- the twinning device is all over the movie -- and then
rams into an obstacle of its own cheerful making. Crushed by
the looming deadline, Charlie acquiesces to Donald's advice and
takes a screenwriting seminar with the guru Robert McKee (the
burly, powerful Brian Cox, who plays McKee as though he wants
to throttle good writing out of his students). The guru's
pronouncements work for Donald but not for Charlie, whose very
being rebels against cookie-cutter solutions. And then it happens,
the make-or-break climax: Donald takes over the writing of Charlie's
(or Kaufman's) script, and the movie becomes an essay on the
folly of rewriting. Kaufman and Jonze quite intentionally trash
their own movie, sending Charlie and Donald off into the swamp
to face a gun-toting John and Susan as well as voracious alligators.
This is really the only possible ending for such a deconstructionist
movie (foreshadowed when Charlie jokingly gives Donald an idea
for a thriller called The Deconstructionist). Since the
movie creates itself as it goes along, it makes perfect sense
that it should destroy itself. By so doing -- in a climax that
will disappoint many who hoped for something less conventional
-- it effectively trounces everything Donald, McKee, and Hollywood
stand for. It has been made without the slightest concern about
whether you like it.
Kaufman and Jonze have done
it again. Adaptation, like their previous collaboration
Being
John Malkovich, is a deep toybox of ideas and jokes.
It will confound some and inspire others to riff endlessly on
its mysteries. It will take its place alongside Barton
Fink and Naked Lunch as an off-center comedy about
the tangles of a writer's mind (and those films had bizarre,
audience-indifferent endings too). And the movie's title expands
in meaning the more you think about it. Writing is a form of
life, and life a form of writing: both require improvising, planning,
adapting. This comedy about the making and unmaking of itself
turns out to have a lot more on its mind.
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