Adaptation

The information at the top of this column is correct, but it's also misleading. There is, in fact, a new movie called Adaptation, opening this Fri., Dec. 6. It is directed by Spike Jonze, whose first feature, 1999's Being John Malkovich, earned rave reviews and a cult following. But while Jonze is a fine filmmaker?so clever and original that tv-hating boomer film critics conveniently neglect to hold his music video background against him?he's not the sole driving force behind either movie's sensibility, as I'm sure he'd be the first to admit. Equal or greater credit belongs to screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who wrote Malkovich, Adaptation and Human Nature, an underappreciated satire-romance directed by Michel Gondry. Kaufman's mix of philosophical inquiry, sci-fi nuttiness and revue-sketch slapstick suggests not another famous screenwriter, but a fun-serious novelist along the lines of Thomas Pynchon or Kurt Vonnegut?a satirist and fantasist who's so original that critics don't dare ghettoize him by genre.

Unlike most top-shelf Hollywood screenwriters, Kaufman doesn't seem terribly, er, adaptable. Anything he writes is likely to turn into a Charlie Kaufman script. That's apparently what happened with Adaptation, a version of Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief that Kaufman took on after Malkovich. When he finally delivered a draft after months of helpless toil, The Orchid Thief had mysteriously turned into a comedy titled Adaptation, about a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) trying to juggle his pathetic, loveless existence and an assignment to adapt an unadaptable book called The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean (appealingly played by Meryl Streep, in her tenderhearted-professional-woman mode).

Charlie is the most passive, wheedling, unpleasant character to anchor a major motion picture since Albert Brooks in Defending Your Life. He's a worrywart who fears his Malkovich success was an exception to Hollywood's rules, and that he can't adapt to give the system what it needs (or what Hollywood has trained viewers to think they need). He's afraid he can't adapt his personality to be more attractive to others (women, especially). He masturbates constantly, putting the lie to Woody Allen's description of the act as "sex with someone I love." He wears his hair wild because he can't face the fact that he's going bald. (Note to self: Get a haircut.) "I am pathetic," Charlie tells himself. "I am a loser." Like the characters in Malkovich, Charlie wishes he were someone else.

That wish manifests itself with the sudden arrival of his twin brother, Donald (Cage again), a goofy, much shallower doppelganger who shows up on Charlie's doorstep with the news that he wants to be a bigtime Hollywood screenwriter just like Charlie. Donald has an idea so cliched it makes Charlie nauseous?a cat-and-mouse suspense picture about a cop and a serial killer who have more in common than they realize. (This trope is a condemnation of Hollywood formula, but it's also a sly admission that Kaufman borrowed and remade this same device for Adaptation; in reality, Charlie Kaufman has no twin brother named Donald.)

Donald's simple personality suits him for a career in Hollywood; he doesn't waste time investigating himself through his art because he's too busy trying to please audiences and make big bucks. He swears by the teachings of screenwriting guru Robert McKee and encourages Charlie to seek him out. McKee (played by Brian Cox as a self-dramatizing flim-flam man) preaches the gospel of the three-act structure, encourages whammo finales and forbids flashbacks, voiceover narration and other devices Kaufman deploys with impunity.

In typically inside-out Kaufman fashion, the young screenwriter embraces McKee's teachings and even seems moved by his passion, yet the film we're watching isn't a McKee-approved Hollywood product?not by a longshot. In one scene, Charlie chastises himself in voiceover for using voiceover. The blowout finale, which has major characters doing impulsive, violent things purely to satisfy plot contrivance, is sheer madness, like a Brian De Palma ending directed by Ed Wood. It doesn't just suck; it's supposed to suck.

Writer's block is not an inherently cinematic subject, and in choosing to build a whole film around it, Kaufman and Jonze guarantee that Adaptation won't engross as many people as did Malkovich, an inverted 2001 about misfit loners probing the boundaries of inner space. Fortunately, Jonze sells the most absurd events just as he did in Malkovich, shooting each scene in the most plain, unpretty, unfussy way possible, and insisting on low-key, psychologically credible performances. (Carter Burwell's grand, mopey score inflates Charlie's angst and makes his flailings even funnier.) Playing dual roles via split-screen, Cage is the sharpest and strangest he's been since his oddball glory days in Raising Arizona and Moonstruck. He's a big man, but as Charlie, he somehow seems small, frail, beaten, and he manages to make Donald so innocent and decent that the character's relentless optimism never grates.

Best of all is Kaufman's script, which goes beyond the hothouse madness of Barton Fink, Naked Lunch and other writer's block dramas. It's all over the place, intercutting Charlie's personal life and career woes with flashbacks to the creation of Orlean's book, which required her to spend weeks in the Everglades with a toothless, widowed, motormouthed orchid thief named John Laroche (Chris Cooper, an icon of Old West integrity reconfigured as a hostile swamp rat). Like Malkovich and Human Nature, Adaptation at first seems a compendium of all the things Hollywood movies aren't supposed to contain?a mountain of symbols, red herrings and loose ends. As poor Charlie babbles ideas into his microcassette recorder, Jonze and Kaufman find room for candlelit flashbacks to Charles Darwin writing The Origin of Species and a rapid-fire montage depicting the rise of life on Earth. (Lava galore.) One character sports a tattoo of a snake swallowing its own tail?a metaphor for Kaufman's methods.

Somehow these seemingly random pieces fit together nicely. Until you look back at Adaptation, you might not realize how thematically tight it is. It tells two parallel stories, a la The Godfather, Part II. One story concerns Susan's original fact-finding trip to the Everglades, where she hoped to discover what drove Laroche, and her subsequent attempt to expand her original New Yorker article into a book. The other follows Charlie, a social autistic who lucked into Hollywood riches, as he tries to give Susan's book a commercial structure without betraying everything that made the book worth reading. Both stories are about talented writers engaged in a doomed and perhaps dishonest enterprise. They're both desperate to find a magic key that will let them explain the motives of the people they're writing about?a Rosebud. The pleasantly neurotic Susan and the deeply unhappy Charlie have few scenes together, but share one important quality: they're less interested in the bones of drama than in the flesh?the inconvenient details of life. They hope their work will explain themselves to themselves?that the act of writing can fill in a personality's blank spots, pave over complications and redeem catastrophic mistakes. They know the quest is impossible, but they can't give it up. They both profess to seek passion but never realize they already possess it; prodded by Hollywood, they confuse integrity with stubbornness, and this confusion leads to disaster. "For a person, adapting is almost shameful," Susan says. "It's like running away." Adaptation doesn't run; it stands its ground.