|
 |
|
Adaptation
****
Cinema
Reviews - Week of March 7, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. USA.
114 minutes. Directed by Spike Jonze. Written by Charlie Kaufman, Donald
Kaufman. Starring Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Tilda Swinton, Chris Cooper,
Cara Seymour, G. Paul Davis, Curtis Hanson, Maggie
Gyllenhaal.
"Adaptation" is from the writing
and directing team that brought us "Being John Malkovich" -- it's another
crazy comedy, and one of those movies that makes you chuckle by referencing
itself, playing around with its own nature and generally screwing with your
head. On that level, it's brilliant enough. But for writers, this is the
kind of movie that penetrates the soul. It articulates all our doubts,
insecurities, reoccurring visions, neuroses, indulgences and passions. And
it goes about that in a way that is about the process of writing on all different
kinds of levels, through construction of astonishing inventiveness and
wit.
I'm sitting here plagued by thoughts of all the
different ways a review of the film could be approached. It gets thoughts
and sentences rushing down the hallways of the mind, screaming at each other
to get past. Should I start a stream-of-consciousness ramble about my personal
life, incorporating details from the film and instinctively work it into
some kind of reasonable composition? Perhaps what's in order is a review
of the film with experimental structure -- or would that be something that
everyone would have already tried by now? Maybe the best thing to do would
be to hyperbolise as clinically as possible, lest I end up appearing too
naked for my own good. But no, of course not, because I write these reviews
to put my finger on things through words, and otherwise it's a waste of
time.
Oh, and most of those dilemmas about writing a
review of "Adaptation" have already been covered in other reviews anyway,
so how can I win?
Everything you have been reading was of course
flowing beautifully in my head, and yet written under the interruption of
many sips of water, a few trips to the bathroom, a number of cigarettes that
I dare not reveal even to myself... and I just took a long pointless pause
there, and I forgot how I was going to continue this train of thought, and
so I'm writing this instead.
Incidentally, those four paragraphs were written
weeks ago, fresh from my first viewing of "Adaptation". The excitement of
needing to get something down in words was too great to keep me from the
keyboard, but I ended up leaving the piece unfinished... and now I've seen
the film twice, and am calmer and more relaxed about its greatness... to
the extent that I don't know what to write anymore.
The movie is about its screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman,
played here by Nicolas Cage. He finds himself unable to adapt Susan Orlean's
novel "The Orchid Thief" for the screen. He stalls and gets frustrated, and
his voice-over captures with dead-on accuracy the way our internal monologues
eat away at us in periods of low self-esteem, with ramblings of paranoia
about bodily imperfections, the stalemate of life, constant new plans to
change everything tomorrow and despairing realisations about the lameness
of all these dilemmas. The turning point in the movie comes when Kaufman
writes himself into the screenplay, and we realise that we're watching a
movie about its own writing.
My references to the writing of this review are
not an attempt to copy the film's method. They seem the only way to write
about "Adaptation" with honesty. The normal process of writing involves
translating our thoughts into rhythm and finesse that will involve readers,
with pace and tone appropriate to what we're trying to communicate. This
movie is so knowing about the hemming and hawing and specifics of doubt that
go through the mind of people engaged in that process that it feels like
the only way to do it justice is to confront myself at the keyboard and reveal
what I am thinking in the moment.
Right now, I'm back to thinking that I don't know
what to write, and I should have jotted down some notes when the film was
fresher in my mind, and the only thing I know for sure is that I am in awe.
I love the cutaways to dramatisations of "The Orchid Thief", starring Meryl
Streep and Chris Cooper, and the fact that they are an ingenious way to make
the book into a movie while actually making a movie about something else.
I love the comic skill with which Cage plays dual roles -- Charlie, and his
fictional twin brother Donald, who takes Robert McKee's screenwriting seminar
and happily constructs a hacky serial killer thriller while Charlie's artistic
temperament leaves him unable to write a word. I love the fact that the device
of the twin brothers is a sly comment about gimmicky storytelling, and also
a way to dramatise the eternal fear of straying from good balance and drifting
too far into pompous artistry or pandering populism. (Donald follows good
principles, but doesn't know how to use them properly -- if you're a born
writer, you do not learn lists of writing rules, because you just end up
painting by the numbers, and falling back on conventions rather than arriving
at them when appropriate. The Charlie character has integrity, but they're
pretty useless when they leave him miserable, unfriendly and
deadlocked.)
What I love most about "Adaptation", other than
its observations about the things we think and do, is the audacity with which
it has been put together by Kaufman and director Spike Jonze. Its final act,
something of a metastructural joke that refuses to pay off the drama in an
expected way, is exhilarating, because it's such a damn clever punchline
for a movie whose writer has questions about his own talent. The movie is
inspiring, for we loser writers anyway -- its content empathises with our
dilemmas, and its existence is a shining testament to what the practice of
writing can accomplish.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
2003 Reviews
(alphabetical)
2003 Reviews (by star
rating)
Archive of all cinema reviews
(alphabetical)
Review Archive
Index
UK
Critic main page
|
|
![[Image]](http://www.ukcritic.com/posbanr2.gif)