A WORK IN PROGRESS: Wrestling with Adaptation
by: Matthew Ralph

As my brother Mike and I left the Ritz 12 Theater in Voorhees, New Jersey just a few days before Christmas, I was speechless. Speechless like I often am after witnessing something brilliant.

We, like many who have been scratching their heads and promptly recommending the film to everyone they talk to, had just seen Charlie (and Donald) Kaufman's latest collaboration with MTV-video-god-turned-filmmaker Spike Jonze ó Adaptation.

Struggling in my own mind to classify what I had just seen and thinking of the words that I could use to express my feelings to my companion, my best friend, my hero so to speak, I quickly realized it was unnecessary. My brother and I had enough of a connection to already know how much what we had seen, in a strange way, reflected our own relationship. Neither of us are fat or bald, both of us are real, and we're not twins, but we are close in age and we do...well, let's just say the movie touched us both and the fact that we saw it together made it a moment shared between two extremely kindred spirits.

In any event, the reverence we both showed walking out of the theater, passing the black and white photographs on the wall of all the great movie directors, said all that needed to be said. That and of course the brief foaming at the mouth conversation amongst teenagers barely old enough to be at the posh theater without an adult, who upon exiting behind us promptly announced to everyone how amazing the film was.

"This definitely pushes Punch Drunk Love to number two and Jackass to number three for the best movies I've seen this year."
-One of three unnamed teenagers

Like Punch Drunk Love, Adaptation had been heavily hyped and anticipated for months and casts a couple household name actors in bizarre roles. As for Jackass, well it's a stretch, but then again so is nearly everything about this film.

Considering that Mr. Kaufman again foregoes all manner of convention and demonstrates how he is breaking nearly every accepted rule in the film through his invented twin brother Donald (who he credits for contributing to the screenplay), an aspiring filmmaker content with going the typical blow-things-up route to box office success, the Jackass entry into the equation might not be all that far off.

"He invented a new genre."
-One of the three unnamed teenagers again

So maybe the reason why I chuckled at the response of the three teenagers was that, one, their response was similar to how I would have responded eight years ago, and, two, it was appropriate. Saying that Kaufman has created a new genre may be at best a simplification, but it's one way to describe the film.

Just about anything that has been written and anything I add to that with this review is pretty much a simplification. Why I am even trying?

This all puts me in a similar situation Kaufman was faced with. How do I write a review about a film about adapting a book into a film?

I guess I could tell you that the film starts out on the set of the first Kaufman/Jones masterpiece Being John Malkovich, immediately introducing the self-defeating, confused, and awkwardly inward Kaufman trying to make his presence and perhaps importance known to the actors portraying characters only his mind could create. I could go on to say that he is next seen meeting with an intimidatingly beautiful woman with a British accent in a fancy restaurant, sweating profusely and talking to himself, trying to get another screenwriting assignment and that despite his dissatisfaction with the meeting he lands the task of adapting a book into a film.

But wait, that doesn't really sound all that interesting. Maybe that's the best way to go about it though, explaining what the film is about and then explaining the significance again of what those teenagers were talking about? So wait, where was I?

The book of course is real, the Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, he is real, and somewhere along the line such a meeting probably took place, but from there fact and fiction becomes extremely blurred as we follow the story of how and why Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) is the lead character in his own screen play.

As Kaufman struggles with his own feelings of inadequacy and his awkwardness with the opposite sex, the movie flips to Susan Orlean, (Meryl Streep) years earlier as she tracks down a flower guru in Florida (John Laroche, who is played by Chris Cooper), whom she intends to write an article about for the New Yorker after she learns of his arrest for stealing an enormous amount of rare orchids from a state park.

Somehow this part about the plot sounded a lot better when I read it in the New York Times about a month before I was finally privileged enough to have the film playing within an hour from where I live, but oh well. Back to the review.

Orlean's research and time spent with Laroche leads to the book Kaufman tries so urgently to make into a movie years later, a movie he wants simply to be "about flowers."

But the fact that the book lacks the usual structure of a story worthy of a film only makes matters worse for Charlie as he painfully stares at blank pages while his obnoxiously cheerful twin Donald (also played by Cage) succeeds in thriving on every trite action movie cliche possible in his writing of a movie he calls The 3.

Through Charlie's experience we see the tormented artist struggling to make something honest, something original and see him only frustrated further by his annoying twin thriving on the kind of crap that agents and execs. drool over time and time again, the kind of garbage that follows to a t what he he learns from a screenwriting workshop taught by a holier-than-thou Bob McKee (Brian Cox).

Meanwhile, Orlean is struggling to see how anyone could be so passionate about one thing one day and then completely change the next. Laroche's obsessions through the years are plentiful and yet Orlean can't seem to muster up any ounce of passion. She can't seem to love or feel or care for anything that deeply.

In the end both characters turn to relationships for answers, Charlie to his brother Donald for help finishing his screen play, Orlean to her subject, who reveals the true secret of the orchid and opens up feelings she never knew she had inside of her.

The result is an ending fit for Donald's oeuvre a six-figure contract for his script The 3 is sure to garner, an exposing of the psychotic rage of Orlean and perhaps one of the most touching scenes between the same actor ever captured on film.

Seriously, I was nearly in tears when Donald and Charlie, Cage and Cage bond over a memory each has of high school, one they both knew the whole truth about without realizing what each knew about the girl that Donald was in love with and talked to regardless of how much she ridiculed him afterwards. How did that go? "I decided a long time ago to love what I have, not what loves me." Something like that. That's what I was trying to explain by referencing my brother in the first paragraph. Darn, this review sucks. I think I should just tear this up and start over again. Better yet, maybe I should just get out my thesaurus and write a couple long fancy sentences that would impress the hell out of my high school English teacher and make me more attractive to all the hip and cool websites that people actually read...

In running the risk of being pretentious and treading close to creating a movie where nothing really happens and nothing is really accomplished (think Memento), Kaufman succeeds in breathing life into a script worthy of continued analysis, Jonze in making a film reflective of our own lives to an extent that we are moved unlike any movie has moved us before and tickled with laughter in a way we don't quite understand. And all this while watching a film we don't really discover is actually a film until the credits roll, only to realize, if we've stayed long enough, that the credits themselves are challenging the whole notion of fact/fiction, what is appropriate/not appropriate for a film etc., all over again.

2002 White Elephant Productions