Adaptation is precisely the kind of film you would expect to see if you imagined someone close to writer Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze sitting down with the two after watching their previous collaboration, Being John Malkovich, and saying with a disapproving cluck, "You guys call that off-the-wall? You can do better than that."

Containing both fictional and non-fictional elements, the most simple explanation of Adaptation’s story is that it follows the trying process that screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) is having adapting author Susan Orlean’s (Meryl Streep) non-fiction book, The Orchid Thief, into a screenplay. In an effort to relieve the stress that writing a script about plants is causing, Kaufman injects himself into the script.

Adaptation’s main selling point comes in its sly and subtle commentary on both Hollywood and the entertainment industry. As played by Cage, Charlie Kaufman is a nervous wreck, constantly sweating and worried about the impact of his work; in his eyes, it’s never good enough for anyone. The irony of this is that no one in Hollywood really cares about the quality of the product or the original nature of the script.

Charlie’s foil is his twin brother Donald, an aspiring screenwriter, who is also played by Cage. Where Charlie agonizes over the proper way to begin a script and how to be true to his characters, Donald follows ‘formula’ as a master plan. When Charlie suggests completely asinine ideas to Donald out of spite, Donald misses the sarcasm and leaps at the ideas as if they were gifts from God (Charlie suggests that a literature professor kill his victims slowly by taking small chunks out of them one at a time. Charlie then suggests the professor call himself "the deconstructionist".).

In real life, Charlie Kaufman does not have a twin brother (nor is he fat and balding), but this is immaterial in the end as one realizes that Donald merely represents the ‘other side’ of the screenwriter’s mind. Constantly falling prey to cliche and always taking the easy way out, Donald symbolizes all that is wrong with commercial Hollywood in Charlie’s eyes.

However, (real life) Kaufman and Jonze barely give you time to come to this conclusion before showing you that it too is irrelevant by setting the last scene of Adaptation in a Florida swamp, featuring gun battles and hungry alligators, something so inherently flawed that Donald may well have concocted it himself.

Adaptation is a film with more layers and more conflicting layers than any other film I can think of. Not only does real life tangle with fiction, but metaphors go back on themselves and epiphanies are rendered useless because of the tyranny of the world.

I can’t admit to understanding the whole of Adaptation–I doubt anyone besides Kaufman and Jonze really can–but none of this interfered with my sheer enjoyment of the year’s most original and bizarre film.

chris neumer

yes, it's true:

If you look carefully, you’ll notice that one of Susan Orlean’s (Meryl Streep) dinner guests is director David O. Russell. Russell directed Spike Jonze in Three Kings.