Adaptation: the review

The subject of Adaptation came up in the comments section of my post about Catch Me If You Can, so without further ado—well, actually a week of ado, but who’s counting?—here are my deathless thoughts on Adaptation.

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Darin and I have not been having an easy time of it, movie-wise, since Sophia was born. It’s been a combination of not having enough time, having different priorities, and living through one of the suckiest periods in American cinema.

What’s been strange is that a lot of the movies we’ve seen have been critically acclaimed and we’ve still hated them. In the middle of Amélie Darin turned to me and said, “Do you think we’re just out of the habit of watching movies?” And he asked at almost the exact moment I was thinking, “Holy crap, this is the biggest movie in French history?” (Call me wacky, but I don’t enjoy movies that find stalkers “fun.” And the prologue, which explained how Amélie got to be the way she was, was so deeply unpleasant for me I was simply predisposed to dislike the rest of the movie.)

Every review we’d heard about Adaptation had been so overwhelmingly positive. You’d think we’d have learned our lesson on believing reviews after Mulholland Drive (Hated it! And yes, I understood it just fine—I still thought it was pretentious artistic crap), Amélie, Sexy Beast, AI: Artificial Intelligence (I want the 18 hours of my life that movie sucked away back), or Donnie Darko (well, actually, Darin saw that one without me, but I’ll take his word for it).

You’d think we’d learn our lesson, but you’d be so wrong.

(Warning: spoilers, spoilers, spoilers. And spoilers.)

Adaptation is the story of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s (Nicolas Cage) valiant attempt to turn the book The Orchid Thief into a screenplay without giving up any of his artistic principles—for example, he doesn’t want to write a movie that has gunplay or sex or drugs or car chases, because he’s an artist and that’s just Hollywood crap.

His twin brother Donald has no such artistic scruples: he wants to write a formulaic Hollywood thriller that sells for a million bucks. As Charlie struggles with the obstacles presented by a book that has no filmable story, Donald churns out a completely nonsensical thriller about a cop, a serial killer, and the killer’s next victim who are actually three parts of a split personality.

The movie jumps around between Charlie’s struggle to adapt The Orchid Thief and Susan Orlean’s struggle to write the book, including her interaction with the main character of her book, John Laroche (Chris Cooper), an orchid fanatic. Laroche’s fanaticism affects Orlean, and in turn it affects Kaufman, who has a breakthrough in writing the script after talking to mainstream Hollywood guru Robert McKee and finally gets writing when he decides to make himself the main character.

Charlie eventually becomes obsessed with Susan Orlean and he and Donald follow her and discover her secret life, which includes having an affair with Laroche and snorting a drug made from a supersecret orchid. In an attempt to keep the brothers Kaufman from revealing what they’ve found out, Orlean and Laroche attempt to kill them, finally succeeding in killing Donald. Charlie, meanwhile, has finally found the end to his story.

That’s it. It’s the story of how a writer adapts what sounds like an inherently unfilmable book.

In one conversation I described Adaptation as the “Get it?” movie. As in, Charlie doesn’t want to include gunplay or sex or drugs or car chases in his movie, but he has all of these Hollywood clichés (and more!) in the third act—Get it? Get it?

Or, Donald writes a commercial thriller about a split personality—and while the screenplay for Adaptation is credited to Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman, Donald Kaufman doesn’t really exist! It’s like Charlie’s writing about his own split personality! Get it? Get it?

Or, Charlie, the artistic one, finally seeks help from über-screenwriting guru Robert McKee, who’s known as the guy who’s either encouraging or destroying Hollywood movies, depending on who you’re talking to. He can’t work through the problems on his own, he has to resort to McKee! Get it? Get it?

Or, Charlie masturbates about every woman he has any dealings with, from a waitress to his executive at the studio (Tilda Swinton) to Orlean herself. So I can’t even accuse the filmmakers of engaging in mental masturbation, because they’re way ahead of me: Get it? Get it? Get it, dammit?

I also said to Darin at one point that I thought Adaptation may be the first hypertextual movie: that is, the filmmakers are expecting you to have read articles and heard stories. You’re expected to know, I think, that Donald Kaufman doesn’t exist. You’re expected to know that Susan Orlean does not take drugs and is not having an affair with John Laroche.

A big part of the joke is supposed to be that Charlie falls back on all the movie clichés in order to wrap up his movie. That third act might have worked a lot better for me if it had been interesting at all. It wasn’t—the third act chase through the swamps is tedious and unfunny and comes off, actually, as a really boring, standard-issue Hollywood ending. Which, even if the first two thirds had been enjoyable (they weren’t), would have absolutely killed the movie dead for me anyhow.

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A friend of mine told me she loved Adaptation. The whole depiction of the writer struggling felt really real to her—it’s how she, as a non-writer, feels when it comes time to write. When I told her some of the reasons I didn’t like it, she opined that my take on the movie was based on being “in the Industry,” on knowing too much.

Maybe.

All I know is that this movie keeps appearing on Top Ten lists and I keep thinking, “Are you kidding?”

Or maybe I’m just out of the habit of seeing movies.