Overall Rating
  Awesome: 66.39%
Worth A Look: 18.85%
Average: 6.56%
Pretty Bad: 4.92%
Total Crap: 3.28%
7 reviews, 80 user ratings
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| Adaptation |
by Erik Childress
"Our Destiny Is To Cherish This Film!"
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Anyone who saw Being John Malkovich should know to expect just about anything when director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann reunite for their follow-up. That film was a fanciful meditation on the individual’s quest to have their fifteen minutes while exploring what brings one towards love and lust. Several praised its originality and its ability to use a fantastical premise to dig deeper into the human foibles of relationships. It’s dark humor and surrealistic structure drew me in and then spit me out when its final act turned into “Cocoon.” Their new concoction, “Adaptation”, however took me on a ride the whole way through, fifteen minutes and then some, and as the third act ended and the credits rolled I walked out and found myself thinking about a fourth, fifth and sixth act. Days after I saw it, I’ve lost count which number I’m on.The boundaries between reality and fantasy intersect at a crossroads of the minds of these two filmmakers. John Malkovich, obviously a real actor whom we’re all familiar with, was nevertheless playing himself but with a different middle name. Like Robert Zemeckis’ first Back to the Future sequel, Jonze puts us back onto the set of Being John Malkovich where Charlie Kaufmann (as played by Nicolas Cage) is moping about after we’ve been treated to an opening credits voiceover of self-loathing assuring us how “fat, ugly and repulsive” he thinks he is.
Kaufmann is immediately hired to pen the screenplay of Susan Orlean’s novel, “The Orchid Thief”, an expansion of an article that she wrote for the New Yorker about a man named John Laroche who was once convicted of attempting to take the endangered flower from a Florida reserve. Kaufmann has no idea how to write it. “It’s about flowers,” he says and by maintaining any sense of a film’s three-act system has zero headway into how to start the story. Until he decides to write about him writing the screenplay.
What follows of Adaptation’s structure is a jumping back and forward of the time when Orlean (as played by Meryl Streep) was researching the novel during time spent with Laroche himself (as played by Chris Cooper) and Kaufmann’s attempt to translate it into a viable yarn. Kaufmann even has a twin brother, Donald (also played by Cage, who does NOT exist in real life) who lives with him and in his absence of finding a job decides to take up screenwriting like the brother he admires. Donald’s insistence on using the most overused cliches in modern cinema (serial killers and twist endings), partly in thanks to real-life writing seminar guru Robert McKee (as played by Brian Cox), doesn’t exactly mesh with Charlie’s aversion to even hearing words like “pitch” and “structure.”
Adaptation is the kind of film that one could write about all day, but wouldn’t dream of revealing too much for those who haven’t experienced it for themselves. Any writer, whether novelist, screenwriter, or short essayist worth their salt will kneel at the sharp edges of the script, both the paper itself and what’s printed on it. It’s about so many themes and subthemes on top of its themes and motifs that you won’t know where to begin its praise.
You could start with the acting, which ranks up there along with Far from Heaven as perhaps the greatest 1-2-3 punch of the year. Any actor loves to take on a dual role, but it takes a true actor to pull off the layers involved when playing off oneself. Cage’s interpretation of the real Charlie and the fake Donald suggest both a dual existence of the same coin, with a shame and sad admiration that culminates in a beautiful moment in the wilderness when their world, perhaps ready to crash upon them, is brought into perfect perspective. Streep, at first, seems to have the thankless role of playing the straight role to all the craziness going on around her, but brings to Orlean a soul-searching quality that is in many ways the heart of the film. If Cage has the showiest dual role, than Chris Cooper certainly has the showiest singular role as the scruffy, unappealing Laroche. With his front teeth knocked out and a look that translates to shady upon first look, Cooper manages to not only bring a real depth and humanity to this man but also becomes the beacon of lost and new dreams and the ray of hope that the past is the past. You can take what you want and leave the rest behind forever.
If Orchidelirium is the Victorian name for the flower madness experienced by avid collectors, can there be a simpler term for a story about flowers with one man’s attempt to find them and another’s to understand it? A rose by any other name is still a rose said Shakespeare while Orlean states that “being an orchid hunter has always meant pursuing beautiful things in terrible places.” What does it say when Donald Kaufmann, who looks just like his brother with his thinning hairline and belly-full-of-jelly, manages to be a hit with the ladies (even popular actresses) by exuding confidence while Charlie has trouble capturing the right moment to finally kiss the woman he loves (Cara Seymour, in a small but wonderful performance)?
Charlie keeps reading Orlean’s book looking for the answers. Is it about flowers? Is it about him? Is that too narcissistic for his own good? Is he too consumed with his own ideas of how to set himself apart that he has no room for the ideas of others? Is everything in life just like a pre-packaged Hollywood potpourri or do the movies (the good and the bad), as McKee puts, simply reflect the everyday ups-and-downs of our existence in a smaller time frame? If Casablanca was the greatest screenplay ever written, when you can tell me what its about, then you’ll have a greater understanding of Adaptation. “Wow ‘em in the end and you’ll have a hit,” is one of the many things that Cox’s McKee says and just as we’ve been mocking him through the lion’s share of the film’s length, he turns around to make the most sense out of the picture. Who says the answers can’t come from those you least expect it to?
Adaptation is a film that begs you to pay attention to every nook and cranny, yet plays fair with the audience using a (mostly) straight narrative full of humor and passion. Where Being John Malkovich may have been too wacky for its own good, this film uses its twisted nature to work on multiple levels without calling attention to its own cleverness. It doesn’t use gigantic plot twists or hackneyed dream realities to make us shift gears into what we’re watching. Like the dual meaning of its title, we adapt to it naturally and understand the moments when it’s clear where the fictitious Donald gets his share of credit for Adaptation’s screenplay.Unlike Soderbergh’s adaptation of Solaris, Jonze and Kaufmann give their ideas room to breathe. Discussion and dissection of the film’s plot won’t scrunch our faces with thoughts of “wait a minute, if that was…etc…,” but smiles of joy into how the film worked upon our very perceptions of what movies and life are and expanded our very consciousness into something more than the predetermined final kiss of a romantic comedy. Adaptation does wow us in the end and continues to wow us well afterwards, leaving us hope that we truly are the writers of our own destiny.
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=6436&reviewer=198
originally posted: 12/13/02 12:18:16
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USA
06-Dec-2002 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
02-Apr-2003
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