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"I don't want to cram in sex or guns or car chases or characters learning profound life lessons or growing or coming to like each other or overcome obstacles to succeed in the end. The book isn't like that, and life isn't like that, it just isn't." - Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) on adapting Susan Orlean's (Meryl Streep) The Orchid Thief into a screenplay.
Three years ago, Charlie Kaufman wrote the excitingly original Being John Malkovich. During its production, Kaufman was also working on another screenplay, an adaptation of New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean's novel The Orchid Thief. The book followed orchid poacher and botanist John Laroche as he fought a legal battle for removing flowers from a state preserve and dreamed of making a fortune by cloning the ever so popular orchid. This task was not an easy one for Kaufman and the finished product is not an adaptation of Orchid Thief but Adaptation, the story behind Kaufman's struggle to convert the book into a screenplay.
Nicolas Cage brings screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and his fictional twin brother, Donald (also a screenwriter), to the screen in what could be the most powerful film about Hollywood since Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. Charlie has extremely low self-esteem; he often rips himself apart with comments regarding his appearance and mannerisms. He criticizes his own writing and seems to be one of the loneliest people on the face of the Earth. Donald, on the other hand, is Charlie's foil. He lives and writes the way Charlie wouldn't dare (he's the Tyler Durden to, well, Tyler Durden).
Meanwhile, Susan Orlean is suffering many of the problems Charlie is having. She can write about how passionate life is, but she doesn't really know how it feels. She lives in an unhappy marriage and her only escape is orchid hunting trips with Laroche (Chris Cooper). Laroche is an egomaniac, living off of his delusions of grandeur in the field of botany. He isn't a bad person, just delusional and he, like Donald to Charlie, proves to be Orlean's foil and object of desire in all of his toothless glory.
The end effect of Kaufman's Adaptation is a high speed collision between the "real world" of his adapting the novel and Orlean's personal struggles into the reality set forth by the novel. What we are watching is the adaptation of Orlean's novel through Kaufman's eyes. We watch as he writes himself into the screenplay and thus becomes a part of the movie we, the audience, are watching. Instead of Kaufman providing a portal into actor John Malkovich's head, he is providing the audience with one into his own and this in itself is truly an experience. The only escape for Kaufman is to sink The Orchid Thief and Adaptation into the very clichés he was attempting to avoid. This actually elevates the film's meaning and challenges the viewer to find the breaking point between reality and fiction.
Like Malkovich, Kaufman teams up with visionary director Spike Jonze (who directed such infamous music videos as Weezer's Buddy Holly and the Beastie Boy's Sabotage). With this in mind, some may think that the film is provided with a thick glaze of style over its substance. This, surprisingly enough, is not the case. Like his predecessor Billy Wilder, Jonze leaves much of his creative style in Malkovich. Instead, he relies heavily on the wonderful script by Kaufman (who also championed one of the other great films of 2002, the Chuck Barris bio-pic Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) and performances from the extremely gifted cast. Had this not been done, Adaptation may have just been one of the "good" movies of 2002 as opposed to the best film of 2002. Everything about Adaptation mirrors the reason why we go to the movies in the first place -- for an escape.
The recent DVD treatment by Columbia’s Superbit branch leaves out the extra bells and whistles and hits the audience with astounding transfers of both audio and video. With a film like Adaptation, who needs extras when the film can speak so well for itself?
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