Adaptation

Adaptation is a movie about a screenplay writer who is adapting a book to a screenplay.

No wait. Back up a second. We start at the beginning of the world. Fire, volcano, ash tossed into the air. We fast forward, time lapse photography. A creature crawls out of the primordial ooze. The creature walks erect. Becomes dinosaurs. The dinosaurs die in a horrible meteor shower. Earth is dark again. Then, mammals rise out of the ash. They begin to walk erect. Keep flashing forward. Man evolves, adapts. We work a shot of a woman giving birth in there somehow. Mud huts become towns, towns become cities, and cities become the eastern seaboard of the United States. And out of a building walks Reid Wise, attempting to brainstorm a review of a movie called Adaptation.

No. Crap. That’s all crap.

Okay, let’s start over.

Adaptation is a movie about writing a screenplay. The main character in the movie is Charlie Kaufman, played adeptly by Nicholas Cage. A real person named Charlie Kaufman wrote the screenplay to the movie Adaptation. In the film, Charlie Kaufman is trying to adapt the book The Orchid Thief, by New Yorker author Susan Orlean, to the big screen. Susan Orlean exists. She wrote a book, in real life, called “The Orchid Thief”. And the real Charlie Kaufman adapted it for the movies, and called it… Adaptation.

Confused? That’s part of the point. And thus you see the ultimate draw, and the ultimate possible downfall, of the movie Adaptation. It is almost too cute for its own good.

The only completely fictional character is Charlie’s twin brother, Donald, also played by Cage in a nice changeup role. Donald represents everything that is trite about Hollywood. He writes his own screenplay during the movie, a screenplay that turns out to be a big hit because it paints with every cliché in the book. Meanwhile, Charlie (who also wrote Being John Malcovich… uh, the real Charlie, and possibly the fictional one, who knows) is trying to do something different, something artistic. He wants to show the world the ‘beauty of flowers on the screen’ by adapting The Orchid Thief. But he doesn’t know how. And he doesn’t know if orchids are really all that beautiful in the first place, because it's hard to see beauty when your life is a living hell. This is a problem.

The movie is completely self-referential. Donald’s main character in his screenplay (the one that becomes the Big Cliched Hit) has multiple personality disorder. And the actual screenplay has split the main character into two distinct twin brothers, one with artistic vision and one that writes Hollywood pap.

When Charlie needs help with his screenplay, a screenplay workshop teacher tells him that he has to go back and add a plot – no one wants a movie about flowers. At that point, the screenplay for Adaptation goes back, and plugs a plot into the actual movie.

The workshop teacher also pleads with him not to end the movie with a deus ex machina. One of the last scenes has a deus ex machina device save the main character’s life.

It is important, when viewing the last third of the movie, to think of it as having been written by Charlie’s cliché ridden twin brother. He adds car chases, fights, drugs… everything the first two-thirds of the movie was NOT about. This occurs immediately after Charlie asks his brother Donald for help with the screenplay.

I liked this movie. It was very clever. But almost too clever. The self-referential nature of the movie may drive some viewers bonkers. It’s a work that leaves you feeling as if you have been manipulated, as a viewer, after the whole thing is said and done. But it is also a good commentary both about the struggle of screenplay writing and about the lack of originality in Hollywood.

From a DVD-phile point of view, the disc is disappointing. The only extra on the DVD is a theatrical trailer. It is certainly not worth purchasing for any cool extras. But then, this is an art-house type movie, not a big blockbuster. So perhaps that’s what we should expect.

This movie is recommended for those who want to think - there are more parallels than what I have written here. Be warned, though… if you’ve seen too many ‘too clever’ movies recently, this one is likely to annoy.

Posted by Reid at May 17, 2004 01:58 PM | TrackBack