Confusing, funny, moving… and about almost everything

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/01/2003 (8278 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SUSAN ORLEAN is a good sport. Having written a serious non-fiction book called The Orchid Thief, expanded from a piece she did for the venerable New Yorker magazine, she sees it being adapted — sort of — into a film.

The film, though, is not called The Orchid Thief. It’s called Adaptation, because it’s less about flowers and more about a screenwriter trying to turn a book into a movie. And that’s a whole other thing.

And when the screenwriter is Charlie Kaufman, the brain-fevered boy behind Being John Malkovich, that’s a whole other, other thing.

In some paradoxical sense, Kaufman’s cuckoo-crazy dream, brought to life by smart director Spike Jonze, probably works better than a respectable literary rendering. In its idiosyncratic way, Adaptation does capture the heart of Orlean’s book.

Orchid collecting, for Orlean, is about desiring something you can never have, a condition that is both frustrating and energizing — and at the very heart of being human.

This central longing is never far from Kaufman, as the actual screenwriter or as the on-screen version of himself (played by a vanity-free Nic Cage, who seems to find a perverse enjoyment in looking sweaty, heavy, balding and insecure).

The film starts with Charlie being commissioned to adapt Orlean’s book. Finding himself stymied, he takes the postmodern route and writes about his writer’s block, instead.

Charlie immediately berates himself for being “self-indulgent, narcissistic, solipsistic, pathetic for having no understanding of anything outside my own self-loathing existence.” Fortunately for us, these charges are baseless.

Adaptation is, in fact, about practically everything — the whole history of the world, the intricate, miraculous mechanism of evolution, the history of orchid collecting, the life of a real-life Florida orchid hunter, the moral morass of journalism, the slipperiness of Hollywood, the relationships between man and woman, brother and brother, writer and subject, beginnings and endings.

We touch on Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her initial encounter with toothless orchid expert John Laroche (the incomparable Chris Cooper). He sees a chance to tell his story and expounds on his personal philosophy with the prickly, defensive intelligence of an autodidact. “Are you getting all this?” he asks Susan. “Oh, yes,” she answers, while scribbling “delusions of grandeur, funny smell,” in her notebook.

Their relationship slowly moves from this bad-faith footing to something deeper as Susan sees in the eccentric, marginal, obsessive-compulsive John a glimpse of some passion missing from her life as a privileged New York intellectual.

Streep gives the expected elegance and polish to her early scenes, but she’s an absolute knockout in the film’s conclusion, in which her character — heavily fictionalized, we assume — gets to let her respectable hair down and get stoned, have steamy sex and commit multiple felonies.

Meanwhile in the other main plot, Charlie is battling hilariously with a blank page, a situation not helped by the arrival of Donald (Cage again), his identical twin. Unlike his tortuously unhappy brother, Donald is an incurably cheerful extrovert who seems untroubled by even a speck of self-doubt.

And while Charlie struggles with notions of art — “writing as a journey into the unknown” — Donald is a crassly commercial would-be screenwriter, currently working on a lamebrain script involving every cinematic clich ever coined, from multiple-personality serial killers to car chases, improbable sex scenes and “life-changing epiphanies.”

Eventually, the two main sections of the movie collide in a circular, cerebral, self-referential Mobius strip of meaning, as Charlie’s screenplay seems to be taken over by Donald’s. Suddenly, Adaptation’s characters are smack in the middle of a Hollywood blockbuster, with Kaufman’s skewed takes on gunplay, crashes, animal attacks, and yes, life-changing epiphanies.

It’s all very confusing.

It’s also wonderfully funny and surprisingly moving. A scene in which the bipolar halves of Cage’s astonishing performance — the manic Donald and the depressive Charlie — finally come together in a moment of perfect understanding proves that Kaufman and Jonze aren’t just clever. They’re wise.