Charlie Kaufman writes the way he lives... With Great Difficulty. His Twin Brother Donald Lives the way he writes... with foolish abandon. Susan writes about life... But can't live it. John's life is a book... Waiting to be adapted. One story... Four Lives... A million ways it can end.
Adaptation is a wonderfully cerebral, ultimately solipsistic journey, the filmic version of a Cubist or Futurist painting from the early 20th century. I say Cubist and Futurist because artists like Pablo Picasso (Le guitarist, 1910) and Marcel Duchamp (Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912), though working in a two dimensional plane, found a way to include the third dimension, giving an all-round view of an scene, and in doing so, managed to incorporate the fourth dimension, time: the time needed to move round exploring a scene from different angles. Likewise, the makers of Adaptation take the story of a New York journalist's fascination with a remarkable Florida botanist, and incorporate the process of bringing the story to screen, which becomes its own story, the story of an obsessed screenwriter's agonised struggle to achieve artistic resolution. This self-reflectivity forms a plot of fantastically convoluted knobbly structure, like the surface of the screenwriter's brain.
The first few minutes of this film are quite disconcerting, as it seems as if we are going to watch a documentary, with the actor John Malkovich appearing as himself. But then when Nicholas Cage appears as Charlie Kaufman, a real life screenwriter trying to adapt The Orchid Thief, a book by Susan Orlean, played by Meryl Streep, we realise that the story is more complex than that, using a range of time-shifting techniques, both flash-backs and flash-forwards, and of voice-overs by Kaufman.
Using the structural conceit of twin screenwriting brothers, each following very different paths, one commercial, the other artistic, the filmmakers are able to have their cake and eat it, so to speak, that is, to have a product that is eminently artistic and cerebral, but also includes mainstream elements of dramatic conflict, danger, violence, action, sex, drugs, etc.
The three leads are brilliant. You can't help but admire Nicolas Cage and Chris Cooper for playing characters quite far from the norms of physical attractiveness. Cage is excellent as the sweaty, balding, overweight, anxious, obsessed Charlie Kaufman, and his twin brother and budding screenwriter Donald. Cooper is also great as the botanist Laroche, played throughout as a man missing his two upper front teeth. Streep is very good as the New Yorker magazine writer shadowing Cooper's character. The supporting cast is very good, with Brian Cox notable as a charismatic writing coach.
The film is a meditation on the creation of itself, and of the obstacles in creating something or adapting something that will be true to life... or not. Within its genre (solipsistic self-referential fiction), Adaptation is an exceptional example, culminating, if I understood the plot correctly, in a perfect exclusionary circle of self. The end credits finish with special thanks to the real-life people whose fictionalised characters we have been watching, bringing the story full circle back into reality.
In his intensity and passion and scorn for the easy well-trodden but temptingly well-paid commercial route, the central character of the film, the screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, is reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp: "Following his maxim never to repeat himself, Duchamp "stopped" painting (1923) after 20 works and devoted himself largely to the game of chess." (Source: Idiom.com) We can only hope that Kaufman does not follow the same career path too closely.
- Rating: Exceptional
- When seen: 23 Mar 2011
- Where seen: Home
- More information: IMDB | RottenTomatoes | Wikipedia
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