Double trouble
Charlie Kaufman clones his neuroses in Adaptation.

By Johnny Ray Huston

TO EXPERIENCE THE kind of writer's block that wracks the mind and wrecks the body of Adaptation's Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage, wearing the expression of someone who's habitually beaten), one need only attempt a plot synopsis. Or worse yet, a condensed version of the film's back story. Both endeavors are doomed to failure, so let's, in the spirit of the film itself, combine them. One could say Adaptation is Kaufman's made-for-the-movies rewrite of Susan Orlean's nonfiction work The Orchid Thief, but it isn't, really – it's a movie about Kaufman adapting Orlean's book, a hallucinatory process that involves Kaufman's twin brother, Donald (Cage, in bright-shining dimwit mode), and screenplay guru Robert McKee (Brian Cox), two figures who wield considerably higher narrative power than the main characters in Orlean's book, John Laroche (Chris Cooper) and the author herself (Meryl Streep). Got that?

Neither did I – Adaptation is about much more than the above. It's also about a fetish for (Orlean-like) redheads, a fixation played out with the help of Cara Seymour, Tilda Swinton, Judy Greer, and Kaufman's left hand. It's about mother love, although a mom character never appears on-screen. It's a film about Florida, Hollywood, and the New Yorker. It also cultivates some of Orlean's themes, such as Laroche's collector mentality and her own desire "to know what it feels like to care about something passionately." Adaptation is about twos: Robert McKee as Donald, and Donald as Charlie. And it's about threes: Charlie as John Laroche and Susan Orlean. In fact, every alienated body in this film (which contains a visual depiction of the world's evolution and, later, a screenplay writer's increasingly frustrated attempts at conceiving and describing that visual depiction) could be considered a ghost or mutation or potential soul mate of another. I'll stop there – I can't be blamed for wanting to whittle this movie down to a manageable size.

Adaptation is also Spike Jonze's second movie, and like his debut, Being John Malkovich, it expands the deliberate showiness of his TV-based ad work, all the while maintaining a coherence (thanks to Kaufman's faux-incoherent script, which takes small bites from two different story lines before vomiting up a Möbius strip and Hollywood genre hybrid). As a feature director, Jonze makes both Andersons (Wes and P.T.) seem like they're the concept-bound music-vid makers; in comparison, he's eager to fuse a jarring selection of styles. Weekend and Crash spring to mind when Adaptation's characters hit the road, but Jonze's car collisions connect with an emotional action-film impact that's shocking. On the other hand, he's capable of subtle pleasures, such as the nighttime freeway lights that dance like floating red and blue Lite-Brites behind a beiged-out and bored Orlean as she ponders a move away from her emotionally remote existence.

The actors enjoy moving through Kaufman and Jonze's déjà vu-inducing halls of broken mirrors. As Charlie, Cage has the hirsute physique and saggy posture of a bear trapped in an ill-managed zoo; thanks to Gene Serdena's set decoration, twin brother Donald naggingly hovers at the edge of Charlie's consciousness, forever occupying an apartment that's a full-scale variant of Malkovich's portals. To be honest, I've always enjoyed Streep the comic actor more than Streep the solemn accent-mastering dramatist. The character of Orlean provides her with a larger supply of nuances than the romance novelist she played in the underrated She-Devil and allows her a relaxation absent from the show-stopping musicality (another, if more likable, version of her famed accents) required by Postcards from the Edge. But the standout is Chris Cooper; he brings defiant pathos to a man who would normally be stereotypical joke fodder and proves you can be toothless and fuckable.

I could admit I preferred the romantic humiliations of Adaptation's Orlean-and-Laroche plot thread to the self-conscious clever-cleverness of its Charlie Kaufman plot thread – that is, before the two threads became entwined. But one of Adaptation's bittersweet jokes involves the slow unraveling of cool journalistic "objectivity": Kaufman and Jonze gleefully deconstruct and reverse the stuffy New Yorker conceit that the subject of a story can be mercilessly exposed by an author who remains safely private. Their approach also makes this film not so much critic- or analysis-proof as booby-trapped to reveal a viewer's own fixations or flaws. Adaptation also parodies itself – similar events recur in distorted forms – not to mention Mulholland Drive (in structure) and Kaufman's other scripts. By the end, tragedy and comedy have blended. But then, isn't tragicomedy a mutation of the two? Don't mock me for asking – it's only human nature.
'Adaptation' opens Fri/20 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.