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?