Adaptation.

"Adaptation" is a movie about the writing of its own screenplay. As such, interpreting it gets a bit slippery, as one jumps from meta-level to meta-level trying to get a steady footing on a moving surface. Such labor can become tiresome and feel pointless unless you take special pleasure in it (read: you majored in English) or unless the film in question has something else going for it besides meta-play. Fortunately, "Adaptation" is blessed with some scintillating performances and, under Spike Jonze's direction, makes interpretation fun with breezy dark humor, if such a thing is possible. And, as unexpected as this may seem at the beginning, "Adaptation" even achieves some level of pathos by film's end.

Or does it? That would certainly go against the expressed wishes of the real star of this enterprise, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman really was hired to adapt Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief (itself adapted from a New Yorker article) for the silver screen, as is shown in the film. But Orlean's book isn't plot-driven; it has leisurely digressions and musings, and Orlean often inserts herself to do the digressing and musing. (I haven't read the book, but reviews suggest that the film's portrayal is accurate.)

Kaufman makes some false starts on the difficult task; these are shown onscreen, setting up a parallel plot in which Meryl Streep plays Orlean and Chris Cooper plays John Laroche, the title character of Orlean's book. Streep and Cooper have a nicely wary chemistry, and Streep effectively teases out the pathos in her admissions that her investigations are teaching her more about her own lack of passion than anything else. (Without giving too much of the ending away, I would also like to note that Streep is hilarious while high. Why couldn't she have been in "Friday After Next"? I mean, besides her ur-Caucasian status.) But despite these promising scenes, soon the challenge of turning a feeling, an impression, a few moments of beauty into a film is crushing Kaufman, and he descends into the vitriolic, profane self-hatred common to all writers trying to figure out what the hell to write and why they can't write it.

All this is on the big screen, and portrayed for that screen by Nicolas Cage, whose hangdog looks and effortless deadpan have never been used to greater comedic effect than they are here. Cage also portrays Kaufman's twin brother Donald, who is co-credited with the script of "Adaptation" even though he does not, in fact, exist. Donald is a lovable goof who's sponging off his brother while he tries to find work, until he hits on the idea of becoming a screenwriter. Donald becomes a disciple of real-life script guru Robert McKee (played with hilarious bluster by Brian Cox), who teaches simple, predictable storytelling to connect with the vastest possible audience. Kaufman scorns the lessons Donald is learning, but at the same time Donald is cranking out the text, and Kaufman is looking longingly at the white page in his typewriter, hoping to blacken it with something good.

That's about as much level-untangling as we're going to do today, even though I was an English major. (I was also an economics major and understand the concept of opportunity cost.) One way to figure out what ends up happening in this movie is to look at the title, which is actually "Adaptation." with the period, which to any English major will indicate that the sign and not the meaning is the locus of inquiry. (I have foregone the punctuation in the text here for readability purposes.)

Kaufman tries to make the scattered beautiful sentences and floral images and the pervasive feeling of loss into a movie, without resorting to "Hollywood" tactics, as he puts it in an opening rant. He wants to be a creative artist. But Roland Barthes would tell him that all narratives are recombinations of stuff we've heard before, that creativity is impossible for us since our very notions of meaning come not from eternity but from the society around us. (Not for nothing does Kaufman suggest to his brother that a cinematic serial killer could be a literature professor who cuts his victims apart bit by bit and calls himself "The Deconstructor"; it's both funny and depressingly accurate.) Our notion of what makes a movie, too, comes not from flashes of revelation at a creative summit but from watching other movies; to make a movie, we inescapably combine and recombine gestures and elements, drawn deeper into that intertextual web the more we struggle to break free of it.

Kaufman cannot live easily with this truth, and when it defeats him it breaks him violently. The movie, because it is a product of Kaufman's trials, gets broken just as violently when Kaufman realizes this truth, and a number of levels collapse upon themselves. Cage and Streep manage the difficult feat of playing the resulting absurdities completely straight, setting us up for a bleak, giddy, hilarious finale.

And, in truth, a finale oddly moving. Kaufman's struggles against cliché provide lots of laffs, but the clichés themselves, even as one laughs at their sudden eruption, do have an emotional resonance, as stupid and lazy as they are. Even as they compound the problems of the exposition and development, at some basic emotional level, they relieve them. The movie, itself, has adapted to the forces that shape it, just as each of its characters has; it has lost something, and gained something, and moved on.

What a humbling thing, then, to be trapped in this vast social and cultural construct that makes our existence possible by limiting it! What a satisfying thing, in turn, to see such an abstract concept and the strange desperation and humor its understanding stirs dramatized onscreen in "Adaptation."

ARGUMENTS AGAINST ARGUMENTS AGAINST THIS FILM

"Adaptation" has been charged in many quarters with the sin of self-indulgence. (A particularly vitriolic charge is available in this article at Salon, and a qualified version within this review on Slate.) This is an obvious criticism to make. After all, the screenwriter wrote a movie about himself! And then, knowing that he would get criticized for doing so, he made himself fat, bald, old, inept with an obviously willing woman, sweaty, and poorly dressed, thereby preempting any criticism of cinematic self-gratification, except of course the literal one that can be made about his character's incessant masturbation. (The real Kaufman is married with children, so it's hard to take anything useful from this image of him, but certainly cinematically he's not making out here.)

Furthermore, the screenwriter is making a movie about how noble it was that he failed in the job he contracted to do, while other screenwriters busily toil at the business of adapting books to film without such a celebration of their own struggles. And he thinks his failure is clever! And even worse, he's convinced that this failure is somehow enlightening, more so than successes are!

This last point is easily met; of course failure is more enlightening than success. Success, most times, betrays nothing of its own accomplishment. Second, it's not the failure Kaufman thinks is worthwhile, exactly; it's the way the failure can interact with the process of failing. That ain't something you see every day, regardless of what else you want to say about it. Third, yeah, the movie's about him, and he gets to have a big Hollywood star play an extremely fictionalized version of himself. That's par for the metafictional course, when you get down to it; if you're going to explore and explode the boundary between author and text, there has to be an author on the other side of the boundary, right?

A more interesting line of inquiry is whether Kaufman's dilemma, as expressed in this movie, is particular to Kaufman or can teach us all something. As you can probably tell by my review, I am inclined towards the latter view. Both Kaufmans, Charlie and Donald, are really personality archetypes, as opposed to the more fully formed characters of Orlean and Laroche; Charlie is an unreasonable exaggeration of neurosis and longing for the gray area, Donald an unreasonable exaggeration of childlike goofiness and the drive towards simplicity. Thus they can best be interpreted not as two different characters but as two different parts of one rounded character, with internecine arguments that end up driving one person's output.

Do we all have conflicts of this type when embarking on artistic creation? We sure do, or at any rate we should if our art is going to be any good. Do we all think, when we hear Barthes' refutation of creativity, that we are the only people in the world to whom this limitation does not apply? I sure did. "Adaptation" is not a closed loop, meaning something only in its own frame of reference; it speaks to all of us, even if what it has to say is not real comforting (to certain critics).

One more thing: Even if "Adaptation" was entirely without real characters, and meant something only with reference to itself, it still might be enjoyable if the wit and skill employed in its making were still present. In exactly the same way as romantic comedies get to ignore plausibility and action movies get to substitute sound editing for scriptwriting, metamovies should get to substitute conceptual play and fleet, seductive ironies for anything else they might be lacking in the Annals of Cinematic Quality. Though the audience of English majors is of necessity a limited one, we deserve our movie candy as much as everyone else, and critics shouldn't damn my dessert as unnourishing simply because they don't think it's got the proper flavor.

"XXX" was also a good movie, dammit.

ESSENTIALLY POINTLESS INFORMATION

At certain points in the film, Susan Orlean is shown working at her New Yorker office in the Conde Nast building. Jonze and company apparently got access to the actual building, because the elevators and view from her window are as they would be in real life. (I don't know what the New Yorker offices look like...yet.)

SUBSEQUENT PROPS

David Edelstein, Slate's head movie reviewer, was kind enough to quote this review at a pretty good length in a discussion of the films of 2002. I did have to actually send him the review, since he's not a Spam-O-Maticker. But he read it and plucked a winner, and I appreciate it.

Art Films Home

Spam-O-Matic Home