About a Boy, based on the novel by Nick Hornby, is really about two boys, Will (Hugh Grant), a thirtyish sexist unemployed lout who lives off of song royalties from his father, and Marcus (Nicholas Holt), a twelve-year-old just trying to make it through school help his depressed mother Fiona (Toni Collette) be happy. Will, who has no job, wanders through life knowing that he’s the coolest person in the world. Are normal people without jobs able to live in fabulous apartments, drive Audis, and eat out at expensive restaurants? As he might say, not bloody well likely. Will lives off of the profits of “Santa’s Super Sleigh”, a Christmas song written by his father decades previous. Will mentions that his father struggled for years to create another hit, but that all he was remembered for was a Christmas song. I got the feeling that Will was envious of his father, since at the rate Will’s going, at least his father is remembered.

Will stumbles across the notion that after dating fabulous women for years, that in the end they all want commitment from him, something that he’s not freely willing to give to them. But divorced women with children just want to date, and if they have to dump you, it’s their child, or their ex-husband, or “it’s not you, it’s me”. How could anyone have missed this untapped font of non-commitment?

He begins attending SPAT, Single Parents Alone Together, and meets a young widow who is friends with Fiona, who’s the mother of Marcus, who was also in a film with Kevin Bacon (just kidding). After an outing to the park with a heavy loaf of bread and living through a rather horrendous situation later the same evening, Marcus wants Will to date Fiona so he can “help her be happy again”. Will doesn’t want to help anyone be happy but himself.

Starring:
Hugh Grant, Nicholas Hoult, Rachel Weisz, Toni Collette
Directed By:
Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz
Release Date:
May 17, 2002
MPAA Rating:
PG-13 for brief strong language and some thematic elements.
Distributors:
Universal Pictures Distribution
3.5 Stars

A dance begins between Will and Marcus, with both attempting to make the other a better person. They naturally succeed (this is Hollywood, remember), but not in the cutesy Freddy Prinze Jr. way that it could. Will tries to help Marcus be cool, and Marcus tries to help Will not get trapped in lies. It all, for the most part, works out fairly well.

Hugh Grant bites into the muscles of his character and tears them out by the sinews. I think Grant, who was so sweet and nice in Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, has been waiting for years to play a role that’s likeable, but not that likeable. He’s rude, dull, arrogant and pompous, and Grant bulldozes his squeaky impression. I think he’s employing a little method acting in this film, since deep down inside all men wouldn’t mind the life that Will leads, given the chance.

Nicholas Holt does a pretty good job of standing up to Grant, but unlike the book, his character is a little more recessed than Grant’s. Marcus could whine, but he doesn’t. Bullies pick on him, his mother cries all of the time, he sings “Killing Me Softly” out loud in class by accident, but he attempts to take it in stride, knowing that one day when he gets to University that he’ll be better. I was impressed with his performance, and his character is well rounded compared to other screen teens.

Toni Collette plays Fiona as she was written in the novel; one of the most horrendous vegan hippies that you’ve ever seen with polish and style. This is a far cry from the what could have been cliché poor-but-still-has-her-dignity single mom that she played in The Sixth Sense so well. Short hair, Army surplus clothes, hat knitted in Peru, she oozes hippie. She cares about Marcus more than anything, but depression usually wins out in her battle to care for him. It’s heart wrenching to watch.

Lastly, Rachel Weisz plays the object of Will’s affection and the victim of his lies. I haven’t seen any of The Mummy films, but I saw her in Enemy at the Gates, and she seemed little more than window dressing in that film. Unfortunately, she’s sort of used as window dressing here too. If this were a Bogart film from the 1940’s, she’d be “The Skirt”.

I liked this film a lot and laughed out loud many times when the audience was silent. I felt kind of weird doing that, but it seemed like a private joke remembered fondly between friends who’ve known each other a very long time.

1. INT. STUDY. 8:15 A.M.

Amateur Film critic GLENN VANCE is sitting in his study on a Saturday morning attempting to figure out what to say about the hilarious and outlandishly bizarre movie, ADAPTATION, he and his wife saw yesterday evening. The difficulty of his task is evident on his face because the film was about so many discombobulated things that it’s hard to describe it without rambling. If he could just find the one word that would bring it all together, make everything clearer to him and the roughly 10 devoted readers of his website, it would be perfect. The one word that when the film is broken down to its basic elements could sum it up….

2. INT. STUDY. 1 HOUR, 55 MINUTES LATER.

We see a blank computer screen. The cursor blinks like a metronome.

With Adaptation, the new film from the writer/director duo of Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, this is not easy. At its most basic level it’s about a screenwriter attempting to adapt a book, “The Orchid Thief”, into a screenplay about a man who steals orchids from the swamps of Florida, however it’s also about the author of the book, her relationship with the orchid thief himself, and both of their relationships to the screenplay writer. Throw into the mix a film jumps backward and forward in time and it’s difficult to find the one perfect word that best describes the film, but IRONY is a good place to start.

Starring:
Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Tilda Swinton, Brian Cox
Directed By:
Spike Jonze
Release Date:
December 6th, 2002
MPAA Rating:
R for language, sexuality, some drug use and violent images.
Distributors:
Sony Pictures Releasing
2.5 Stars

But more about that in a moment.

Spike Jonze, who directed the mind-blowing Being John Malkovich, here jumps feet-first into his sophomore effort like a paratrooper on D-Day morning and expands upon the odd visual world that he created with his previous feature. His favorite accomplice, Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, mines his own fears, faults and self-loathing to create a level of inner paranoia rarely seen since Vertigo. Kaufman’s script is as fertile as the Tennessee valley, which literally covers the entire history of Earth from The Beginning to now and how screenwriter Charlie fits into it. Nicholas Cage plays Charlie Kaufman and Charlie’s (fictitious) twin brother Donald. Charlie has little self confidence and is introverted while Donald is extroverted to a fault and crass. Cage, who lately has slummed in such films as Windtalkers and Gone in Sixty Seconds, finally retreats back to ‘Thespian Nicholas Cage’, the Cage of Leaving Las Vegas, Moonstruck and Raising Arizona. He’s so good here that it’s a true joy to see him actually acting rather than just starring in a film. He is excellent as the fat balding frightened Kaufman and has already garnered a Golden Globe nomination for the role. Hopefully this won’t be a fluke.

The film is fun and interesting and engaging; you actually care about these three little people. You really do care, a rarity in this modern world of disposable celluloid. You care about the book’s author and her sham marriage and you care about Kaufman as he sweats bullets over a possible sophomore slump on his hands. Chris Cooper’s thief has such a passion for plants that you amaze at the fact that he’s only studied them for several years, not his entire life. The laughs in the film come out of the dialogue like machine gun bullets belching from an AK-47, but most of the laughs come from the IRONY of the situations, not cheap one-liners. The casual filmgoer (the lovers of such films as Gone in Sixty Seconds) will probably not realize that most of the third act of the film is played out for laughs rather than pathos and for that one could fault Jonze’s sometimes arrogant direction. Kaufman’s screenplay (the real one, not the film-within-a-film one) tries hard to show that Charlie doesn’t want to fall back on standard clichés like car chases, gun fights, buddy-film clichés and the like but in the end can’t decide how to end the film. Jonze unfortunately doesn’t remind his audience that these conventions are all an in-joke and I ended up laughing at the chase through the Florida swamp with three other people in the theater while the rest sat in rapt attention at the “sadness” that was unfolding on the screen. Jonze is good with the irony here, but he forgets to let the audience in on the joke. Ironic, no?