Adaptation

Directed by Spike Jonze

Written by Charlie Kaufman

Starring Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep

Chris Cooper

Classification: AA

Rating: ***½

Do I have an original thought in my head, my bald head?

-- Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman
as played by Nicolas Cage

Y
es, dear Charlie, yes, you assuredly do (and why is it that the writers who most need to ask themselves that question don't). You proved your originality in spades with your script for Being John Malkovich, and you're back at it again here. A comic gem with some serious sparkles, Adaptation pulls off a feat I would have thought impossible on the screen -- it manages to dramatize the art and sullen craft of writing. More precisely, it gets into the schizoid head of virtually every wordsmith who ever picked up a quill pen or powered on a computer. That the head happens to belong to Kaufman himself leads me to the next astonishing fact. The result should be a self-indulgent, head-up-its-derrière exercise, and should not appeal to anyone beyond his fellow legion of scribblers. But it isn't, and it does. How has this funny miracle been wrought?

Well, that's going to take a bit of explaining, beginning with the oh-so-involuted premise. We start out with Charlie (Cage) on the busy set of Being John Malkovich (directed by his collaborator Spike Jonze, who's also behind this camera). Charlie has just been commissioned to do his next script, based on an actual book -- a nonfiction work called The Orchid Thief -- by The New Yorker writer Susan Orlean.

The book tells the tale of John Laroche, a fanatical breeder of orchids and something of an exotic specimen himself. He's a bizarre Floridian with long filthy hair and a hollow smile entirely bereft of front teeth -- the gaping hole is big enough to drive his battered pickup through. Also, like many literary journalists, Orlean has written herself into the story, using Laroche's obsession as a template to explore her own detachment. As she ironically puts it: "I suppose I do have an unembarrassed passion. I wanted to know what it feels like to care about something passionately."

Although an admirer of the book, Charlie is completely stymied about how to adapt the thing. As he unironically puts it: "I can't structure this. It's that sprawling New Yorker shit." What follows is his increasingly frustrated and panicky attempt to solve the dilemma. In other words, this is a movie about one writer's struggle to turn another writer's book into a movie. Sometimes, acted out on the screen, we see the early fruits of that struggle -- Orlean (Meryl Streep) in pursuit of her orchid thief (Chris Cooper). At other times, we're simply seeing the struggle itself -- Charlie in pursuit of his nemesis, his adaptation. In the end, the two narratives merge, but more about that later.

So a pattern is already starting to arise that sets this material above the usual film-within-a-film navel-gazing. Instead, the picture is built around a series of dualities, a whole set of doubling motifs that cross-pollinate each other. At the still centre is the image of the wild orchid -- a plant serviced by an insect, blooming with incongruous beauty amidst a surrounding swamp and stolen for self-interested reasons by a passionate thief. This is the rich metaphor that informs all the other tenuous relationships here: between the writer and his subject, between the movie and the book, between a good movie and the fetid Hollywood swamp, between the detachment needed to write objectively and the passion needed to write at all (emotion recollected in tranquillity and tranquillity pierced by emotion).

But hang on -- it gets a tad more complicated still. The real-life figure of Charlie is given a fictitious twin brother named Donald (also portrayed by Cage). Both in the screenwriting biz, the two are a comic study in contrasts, embodying all the dualities I just mentioned, and one more -- the war waged inside any writer between arrogance and insecurity. And that spawns the ceaseless campaign to get the damn combatants to co-operate, to lure them into a productive peace. Too much arrogance and you're a bombastic fool; too much insecurity and you're a paralyzed mute.

Here's where the film finds most of its humour. Donald is blindly confident but a bit stupid; he's a charmer and a hit with the babes; he's a commercial hack who's a slave to three-act convention and a merry devotee of the Hollywood gospel. Conversely, Charlie is self-doubting yet very smart; he's a nerd and a flop with girls; he's a rare talent who despises formulaic rules and wants to chart a brave new aesthetic world.

Sure, their extravagant differences are funny ("You and I share the same DNA," moans Charlie, "Is there anything more lonely than that?").

But it's their mutual need that lends the picture its poignancy. Separately, neither will ever do anything worthwhile. Only together can they "adapt" and bloom, fusing art with commerce, fantasy with reality, and getting on with the show business of life. That's when their particular dilemma begins to resonate beyond the writing fraternity, and their war of words becomes the conflicted voice inside us all, the one that argues simultaneously: "I am a unique individual, an exotic orchid," and, "I am a mere everyman, a humdrum drone."

Of course, these sorts of duelling roles are an actor's dream, and Cage takes full advantage. He and that face of his -- hang-dog homely one minute, vibrantly macho the next -- are perfectly cast. So is Streep as the sophisticated Manhattanite drawn into a steamy realm of Southern discomfort.

And Cooper (whose character is a whole other bundle of wild contrasts) doesn't just steal orchids here -- the guy also swipes every scene he's in. As for Jonze's work, it's unostentatious yet efficient, and that's quite an achievement given the script's involutions. In fact, this is direction in the most literal sense -- he helps us find our way through the maze.

Which brings us to the ending, where the twin narratives (and the twin brothers) come together. Donald is the one who puts his "wow-'em" stamp on the last 15 minutes, with a high-octane injection of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll violence. These scenes are meant to be a parody of a silly Tinseltown ending but, for me, they play too much like the real dumb thing.

See what you think -- could be it's a crowd-pleaser and I'm being as pedantic as Charlie at his most tight-assed.

Either way, there's a lovely redemptive moment at the dénouement (or "denooeymint" as Donald calls it). This time, the dumb bro shows his inner smarts when he gives this wonderfully twisted tale its straightforward moral: "You are what you love, not what loves you." If so, you could do a lot worse than love Adaptation.