R. J. Review of Adaptation.

Adaptation. (2002)

An outrageously grandiose accomplishment: a masterful film about itself!

[18 March 2003]

If you thought "Being John Malkovich" was weird, chances are you'll find the follow-up collaboration between pop video whizkid director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman even weirder, making this proposed adaptation of Susan Orlean's non-fiction best-seller "The Orchid Thief" one of the most bizarre films ever financed by a major studio. For starters, it's not really an adaptation of the book, but rather about the adaptation of the book: this is in fact the story of how screenwriter Charlie Kaufman attemped to write a script adapting Susan Orlean's book and of the mess he gets involved in while doing it. And yes, Kaufman has written himself and all of the real-life characters around the story - Orlean, her subject and orchid-obsessed horticulturalist John Laroche, screenwriting guru Robert McKee - into the story, then has them played by actors and makes them do stuff they never actually did in real life, and invents himself a twin brother who is also credited as co-writer of the finished film. All of this while contemplating the difficulties of adaptation, both in its evolutionary sense and in its Hollywood sense of translating a book into film; "Adaptation" is probably one of most self-obsessed and self-absorbed films ever made - it's a film about its own making - and yet it is an absolutely engrossing study of that one spark of human creativity from which any sort of emotion - hence of art - evolves. Needless to say, it's a pain to explain in writing what the film is all about, but you follow it pretty well on screen thanks to Jonze's effortlessly clear direction. In fact, Jonze replies to the script's chinese-box self-referential structure by simply shooting it straight-forwardly, letting the momentum take care of it. However, its more cerebral tone (this is, after all, a story about a screenwriter's block) means it's a bit more heavy-going than "...Malkovich". Nevertheless, it's an outrageously grandiose accomplishment: Jonze and Kaufman actually pulled it off. One of the most original and enjoyable major-studio films in recent memory, and a field day for cinema theorists.