cinema review

Adaptation turns irony in on itself to reveal a sincere look at screenwriting, yearning for fascination, and flowers.

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Cleverness can be a double-edged sword in film. Audiences respond well to a clever idea. It means that the film will be unique; not following a set formula. The film can be praised for its ingenuity even if the result isn’t successful, and it makes people feel smart by getting it - being on the hip side of an inside joke. Some films will use cleverness to support greater themes and ideas, and others will try to sneak past the audience on the virtue of cleverness alone.

Film making is both a business and an art, and at any point during a film’s production one aspect can overtake the other. When the art overwhelms the business we call it “High Art” - art for art’s sake. High Art takes its subject and approach seriously. That’s not to say that a comedy can’t be High Art. These distinctions are more about the how of the film making process, rather than the film’s subject matter (i.e., what the film is about). It’s just that a High Art comedy will be serious about its subject and genre. High Art will use cleverness as a tool to telling a story.

Low Art, sometimes also called “Pop Art,” is usually the result of the business overwhelming the art. Low Art makes money by appealing to the lowest-common denominator. If a Low Art film is clever it often uses its cleverness to hide the shallowness of the overall concept (Low Art tends to be “High Concept” - a story whose plot can be summed-up in 20 words or less).

It’s not a matter of value as much as approach. Either approach does not necessarily result in a better film than the other (although putting extra thought and care into a film usually does result in a better film).

Adaptation, from director Spike Jonze, is an argument between High and Low Art. The film succeeds as both, due in part to Charlie and Donald Kaufman’s brilliant screenplay.

In mathematics, when you multiply two negative real numbers the result is always positive. Likewise, in Adaptation, Jonze’s ironic take on ironic postmodernism results in a sincere look at writer’s block, human passions, and flowers.

Flowers? Charlie Kaufman was charged with adapting The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, a non-fiction book based on an earlier New Yorker article (also by Orlean) that contains long passages about orchids, no dramatic narrative, and little in the way of a conventional plot. The book is emblematic of the word “unfilmable.”

Given the onerous task of having to produce a screenplay from the material, Kaufman found a way out: he put himself in his own screenplay, making the film less an adaptation of the book than it is a story about adapting an unfilmable book into a screenplay.

In the process, Kaufman invented a twin brother for himself. In another clever twist, Donald receives a screenwriting credit for the Adaptation script (and subsequent Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations for “Best Adapted Screenplay,” even though much of the script is original material).

Both Kaufman brothers are played, in a bravado performance, by Nicolas Cage (Jonze’s then cousin-in-law). Cage makes each brother instantly identifiable. We are never in doubt of which brother is which, because Cage varies not only his line readings and manner of speech for each of the twins, but also his posture, the way each walks, the very physical presence of these two characters which are, after all, genetically identical.

Jonze and his special effects crew score some points here, too. Adaptation uses digital effects in the best way possible - after the first scene, the effects are completely transparent and we accept the two characters as individuals. Jonze uses a combination of digital trickery, split screen, and old-school camera work to conceal the fact that both characters are being played by the same actor (Cage’s real-life non-twin brother Marc Coppola served as a body double).

“I’m a walking cliché.” —Charlie Kaufman

Adaptation opens on the set of Jonze and Kaufman’s previous collaboration, Being John Malkovich, with Jonze poking fun at himself as the real Malkovich (other cameos include John Cusack and Catherine Keener, also playing themselves) takes control and directs the scene. On the wings stands the fictional version of Charlie Kaufman (Cage), the writer of both Malkovich and Adaptation.

Jonze takes the age-old question “Who am I, and how did I get here?” literally through a series of flashbacks and time-lapse photography from “Four Billion and Forty Years Ago” (a nod to the old joke where a museum patron asks the janitor how old is the T-Rex skeleton - the janitor tells him it’s four million and seven years old - the man asks him how can he be so accurate, and the janitor says “Well, it was four million years old when I started working here seven years ago.”) to the present. It’s reminiscent of the shot in Three Kings where David O. Russell (who has an uncredited cameo in Adaptation as one of Orlean’s dinner guests) shows the effects of a bullet entering the human body. In Adaptation, the flashback and time-lapse sets up our introduction to the concept of evolution, and establishes one of several viewpoints from which we can examine how the title fits the film.

All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth

The titular character is John Laroche (Chris Cooper), a Floridian orchid poacher who employs Seminole Indians to pick and transport the orchids for him, since they’re on state-owned land, and the Seminoles have faced and won against litigation for removing protected (and endangered) plants out of the swamp.

Like his musical namesake, Spike Jonze presents a character who is missing his two front teeth (although Laroche didn’t lose his by sliding down the banister - the flashback showing how he lost them is one of the great flinch-inducing moments of cinema).

Conveniently, Laroche listens to The Writings of Charles Darwin book on tape in his van, so that we can get a crash course in natural selection and evolution. Ultimately evolutionary adaptation is only glossed-over in the film, as Charlie points out his incredulity that he and his brother share the same DNA.

The Laroche and Orlean sections play like a parallel to the Charlie/Donald dichotomy - Laroche is confident and capable, and Orlean is adrift, uninterested, dispassionate in her life as well as her journalism.

“I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately.” —Susan Orlean

Half of the film plays like a direct adaptation of the book. When Orlean thinks (in voice-over narration), she does so in lines from The Orchid Thief. In a flashback to when Orlean was writing her piece for The New Yorker, we meet Laroche (the titular character of Orlean’s story) and see their interaction as is depicted in the article (and subsequently the book).

The book contains long passages about flowers, and the film contains some brief excerpts from the book, including a wonderful section about how orchids are like people, but this part of the film belongs to Orlean. Her disappointment in seeing a ghost orchid parallels her overall dissatisfaction: this is it? This is what so many people have risked so much to find? It’s just a flower!

In Adaptation Orlean represents a High Art ideal - her work yields the necessarily uncinematic - and every time the film focuses on Orlean and Laroche we are reminded of the direction that the film could have taken, were the screenplay closer to a true adaptation of Orlean’s book.

Charlie Kaufman Pitches a Movie

“Okay, but I’m saying, it’s like, I don’t want to cram in sex, or, uh, guns, or car chases, you know, or characters, you know, learning profound life lessons. Or growing, or coming to like each other, or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end, you know? I mean, the book isn’t like that, and life isn’t like that. You know, it just isn’t. And… I feel very strongly about this.”

The above monologue from Charlie Kaufman is a battle cry for High Art. Charlie is a postmodernist, wanting to write a screenplay that avoids the tropes of his time, to escape genre and formula, to escape the past by writing a film that is unique and can only be valued on its own terms.

Jonze pushes the postmodern elements of the film to more than a mere wink by showing various scenes of Kaufman physically masturbating (rather than metaphorically, as he does by putting himself in his screenplay). We are treated to Charlie Kaufman’s masturbatory fantasies of imagining himself being seduced by a young film executive (Tilda Swinton), a friend that Kaufman wishes were more than just a friend (Cara Seymour), a diner waitress (Judy Greer), and Orlean herself (Streep).

Charlie’s natural state is that of unfulfillment. He can’t figure out how to adapt a book about flowers into a screenplay, and even the simplest things in life are seemingly insurmountable hurdles that the neurotic Kaufman believes that he cannot overcome.

While ineffectual, Charlie has enough integrity to not throw Hollywood clichés into his screenplay - that is to say the character Charlie Kaufman has such integrity. The actual screenwriter has no problem turning formula inside-out to make an ironic statement about screenwriting formula.

Donald, however, wants to learn to write a screenplay so he can get paid and get laid. He’s working on a cheesy police thriller called “The 3” (a poke at the spelling of David Fincher’s Se7en) with a ridiculous twist ending (“Mom called it ‘psychologically taut,’” says Donald to his brother). He reads books and attends a screenwriting seminar given by script guru Robert McKee (also a real person, who is played in the film by the indispensable Brian Cox) who advises against the use of voice-over and ending the film with a deus ex machina, even though in a way the McKee character is one. Donald is a Modernist.

The fictional Donald (if we’re to be fair, Charlie is equally as fictional, even if the character shares his name with the screenwriter) is Charlie’s alter-ego - like a voice in the head of the real Charlie Kaufman telling him to give up, to throw in some movie clichés, cash-in, make a million bucks, and get the girl.

McKee writes that all screenwriters write in a genre, and that they must write in their genre and master it. This is the antithesis of Charlie’s postmodern ideals. Charlie believes that each film is unique, that there is no way to write a good film in a formula. He’s probably right, but will his integrity earn him money, accolades, the girl, or respect (from himself or others)?

Charlie and Donald serve as two aspects of the same person. Charlie is insecure, socially inept, and struggling to find an artistic validity to his adaptation project. Donald is great with people, popular with women, and has no artistic intentions - his screenplay is designed to sell.

Charlie’s initial failure to adapt The Orchid Thief makes his character extremely sympathetic. He overcomes adversity and finds a way into the material that results in the film Adaptation. That his voice-over narration appears in the film reminds the audience again that they are watching a movie, not watching events as they unfold (especially since Charlie is aware of his own use of voice-over).

Charlie Kaufman may have had the thoughts he ascribes to his character in the film, but he would have had to later write them into the screenplay, which would then be filmed. The immediacy of Charlie trying to think of an ending to the film at the end of the film is subverted (in a delightful way) by the realization that since the film is being presented as autobiography there is a disconnect between the events as portrayed in the reality of the film, and artifice, the writing down of those events.

Reunification

The two twins/personalities, and their approaches to screenwriting converge when Charlie asks Donald to visit him in New York to read the draft of what will become Adaptation. Charlie asks Donald about his thoughts for fixing the screenplay.

The first two-thirds of the film are all Charlie’s - he decides to write himself into the screenplay (in a wonderful recursive scene where he records into his tape recorder the very dialog the actor just read into his tape recorder - like pointing a video camera into its own monitor and seeing an image inside an image inside an image ad infinitum), depicts Orlean visiting with orchid poacher John Laroche so she can write her story, and makes a sincere attempt to bring much of Orlean’s book to life on the screen.

From the time Donald agrees to help Charlie with the screenplay until the end of the film, Adaptation becomes a Donald Kaufman film - the kind of movie that Robert McKee would be proud to call a formula thriller (since that’s Donald’s genre).

Feeling desperate, Charlie also attends one of McKee’s seminars, which seem to be conveniently given every weekend in a hotel somewhere throughout the country. Stuck in his work, Charlie adds new fuel to his self-loathing engine by giving in and seeking out the screenwriting guru (although McKee has never had a screenplay produced - he’s written for the television series Mrs. Columbo and wrote a made-for-t.v. movie called Abraham).

“You are what you love, not what loves you.” —Donald Kaufman

The twins finally converge into a whole being while being pursued by Orlean and Laroche in the swamp. Ignoring the utter incongruity of the scene (we’re being chased through the swamp by a pair gun-toting drug-addicts - what a perfect time to talk about a girl my brother had a crush on in high school!), when Donald explains to Charlie about how he owns his feelings, the two brothers find a harmony hitherto unrealised. They both grow and come to like each other.

When Donald dies in the next scene, his outlook on life and screenwriting is wholly absorbed and re-integrated into Charlie, who finishes the screenplay without his “brother” (although Donald still gets screenwriting credit).

The anti-McKee-ian voice-over at the end of the film comes from the newly created hybrid of Charlie and Donald, who through the experiences of Adaptation has learned a valuable life lesson, dealt with Orlean and Laroche (who have been having sex and doing drugs), escaped gun fire, survived a car chase, and succeeded in the end by overcoming obstacles.

The 3 opens in multiplexes around the world next summer.

Buy Adaptation on DVD from Amazon.com

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Jough Dempsey is the editor-in-chief of Cinema Review.