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?