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Adaptation tells the story of a book becoming a film
by Jesse Fox Mayshark
Among the opening credits of Adaptation is the relatively innocuous line, "Based on The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean." It's true, in a way—Adaptation is the movie written and produced by the people who bought the rights to New Yorker writer Orlean's nonfiction bestseller, and it includes several scenes drawn straight from the book and entire passages from its text read in voice-over narration.
But Adaptation isn't really the story of Orlean's book, which was an account of her encounters with a colorful Florida swamps orchid hunter named John Laroche. It's the story of a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) who—fresh off a success with a surreal movie called Being John Malkovich—is hired to adapt a book called The Orchid Thief by a New Yorker writer named Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep) about her encounters with a colorful Florida swamps orchid hunter named John Laroche (Chris Cooper). The script for Adaptation was, of course, written by a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman, right after his success with a surreal movie called Being John Malkovich.
We're clearly in post-modernist territory from the get-go here, and if all the self-referentialism and self-consciousness make you a little squeamish, you're not alone. But like the livelier and more daring Being John Malkovich, Adaptation is po-mo without the smirk. Kaufman and director Spike Jonze (the MTV video innovator who also directed Malkovich) don't deconstruct their narratives in pursuit of anything as facile as irony. They're trying in their own ways to be as true as possible to the stories they're telling. What Adaptation is really about—and, the movie suggests, what The Orchid Thief is really about too—is the struggle for honest, heartfelt expression of human experience.
These are very American issues, and not small ones either. In a Media Age society where every event and gesture can be instantly and endlessly repackaged to sell sneakers or political platforms, how do you tell a real story about how things "really" are—especially when you know that the telling of the story itself, in the form of a magazine article, say, or a Hollywood movie, will involve all kinds of subjective manipulations of form and content that will inevitably change the essence of the tale being told?
Heady stuff for a major studio picture with big-name stars. But as they did with Malkovich, Kaufman and Jonze keep the tone improbably light. At its heart, Adaptation is a metaphysical comedy.
The Charlie Kaufman of Adaptation bears only a surface resemblance to the real Charlie Kaufman; a married family man who is reportedly neither fat nor bald, Kaufman makes his screen alter-ego into a lumpish loser with thinning hair and a thickened middle. He also gives him a twin brother, Donald (also played by Cage, who is lovably convincing in both roles), a guileless doofus whose own screenwriting ambitions run toward the kind of formulaic Hollywood crap that Charlie abhors. While Charlie struggles to shape a movie from Orlean's mostly plotless musings, Donald knocks out a script about a multiple-personality serial killer.
The first two-thirds of the film bounce back and forth between Charlie—going through fits of procrastination, masturbation and desperation as his deadline approaches—and scenes faithfully lifted from The Orchid Thief, in which Orlean tries to grasp both Laroche's obsession with flowers and her own growing obsession with him. These scenes show you what an honest rendition of Orlean's writing would look like, and they're fascinating and engaging—if the real-life Laroche was half as kinetic as Cooper is here, it's no wonder he inspired a book—but ultimately uneventful. As Kaufman comes to realize that Orlean's book has no real narrative, no arc of character development or conflict, his screenplay starts to fly off the tracks. The film's producer (played by Tilda Swinton with a calculated warmth—when she smiles, you can hear cash registers ringing) suggests that maybe Orlean and Laroche could fall in love, or maybe the orchids could turn out to have narcotic effects or something. But Kaufman angrily resists; he loves the book, and he wants to be true to it.
The key to the film, and the true realization of its title, is in its final third. This section will undoubtedly generate some critical controversy, as did the twists at the end of Malkovich. Some people will suggest that Kaufman and Jonze haven't yet figured out how to make their narrative acrobatics stick a landing. But I think they know what they're doing. Early on in Adaptation, Kaufman ponders the title word from a biological perspective—"adaptation" as a Darwinian mechanism, the means by which lifeforms respond to changes in their environment. His thoughts are seconded by passages from Orlean's book about the extraordinary variety and flexibility of orchids.
The ambivalent finale of Adaptation (which gives you some idea of what a "conventional" Hollywood approach would do to Orlean's book) suggests that ideas are similarly mutable. The changes they undergo as they move from conversation to magazine article to book to movie are not just a matter of mercenary exploitation but are actually part of an adaptive process dictated by changing environments.
This echoes the concept of "memes," a word invented by biologist Richard Dawkins to suggest a genetic model for the spread of ideas. As far as I know, nobody has yet optioned Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene for a movie. But if anyone does, they ought to give Kaufman and Jonze a call. m
Editors' Note: This movie has not yet opened in Knoxville.
December 12, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 50
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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