Adaptation. [2002]

Perhaps the cleverest Hollywood movie of its generation, Adaptation. is at once an adaptation of Susan Orlean's novelistic non-fiction book The Orchid Thief, a unique exercise in autobiographical fantasy on the part of screenwriter Charles Kaufman [who shares credit with his fictional brother] and a worthy follow-up to director Spike Jonze's first Kaufman-scripted movie Being John Malkovich. Opening on the set of Malkovich, with the writer [played by an intense Nicolas Cage] ordered out of the way by a minion, Adaptation. proceeds to follow more strands than it ought to be able to make sense of. The neurotic Kaufman wins the job of turning Orlean's book into a script and has trouble getting a handle on it, while his more upbeat brother [also Cage] takes a Robert McKee scriptwriting seminar and cranks out a serial killer screenplay that attracts a major buzz. In flashbacks, Orlean [Meryl Streep] works on a New Yorker article and then a book about 'orchid thief' John Laroche [Chris Cooper], a toothless Sam Shepard figure who heads a crew of Seminoles who poach rare flowers ostensibly in order to preserve them from extinction, encouraging the Darwinian process of adaptation essential to evolution. Charlie ends up taking a seminar with McKee [Brian Cox, hilarious] and the film changes [or adapts] into a bizarre Hollywood thriller with drugs manufactured from flowers, a shoot-out between the writers and the subjects in the Florida everglades and a defiant climactic use of a plot device [deus ex machina] and narrative strategy [voice-over] McKee has ordered Charlie not to use. Unrealistically, Kaufman is harangued by fellow students at the McKee lecture [note the guru chose not to play himself] when as a produced screenwriter he would be fawned on by all present, though this thread goes with the exaggerated self-loathing indulged in by a film which enjoys presenting its writer in the worst possible light. Charlie masturbates to fantasies of women he has met, from exec Tilda Swinton through waitress Judy Greer and even the Orlean he imagines from reading her book, though he persistently fouls up with women in person, his come-on to Greer turning a professional flirtation into a hideously creepy moment and his collison with Orlean's life winding up with her trying to kill him. It's a daring stroke to have an alligator kill a real-life person [Laroche] after Orlean has shot dead the fictional other Kaufman, but that perhaps makes you ponder the intricacies of it all rather than taking away the emotional material [moving conversations between the brothers, in which the asshole comes up with wisdom]. Either Jonze is so hot everyone wants to work with him no matter what or this apparently ultra-tightly structured effort was cut down severely since prominent players [Stephen Tobolowsky, Gary Farmer, Maggie Gyllenhaal] barely register. Bits: Curtis Hansen, David O. Russell, an unbilled Malkovich and Caroline Keener as themselves, the excellent Jim Beaver [also in The Life of David Gale]. The 3, 'Donald' Kaufman's script is pitched as 'Silence of the Lambs meets Psycho' but sounds more like a dig at David Fincher, blending aspects of Se7en and Fight Club. So dazzling that it defuses the argument that the hero genuinely has no idea what to do with his material, Adaptation. examines the rules of filmmaking and breaks them, shoots off in all directions [a brief history of life on Earth sped up] but is held together by performance and direction, and will give you enough material for a week's worth of debates and arguments afterwards.

First published in this form here.

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