The I's Have It
Two Egos Are Not the Same As Two Heads.

ADAPTATION
With Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Brian Cox, Chris Cooper
Written by Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman
Directed by Spike Jonze

IN ADAPTATION, the director Spike Jonze and the writer Charlie Kaufman follow up their ultra-hip post-modern black comedy, Being John Malkovich, with the fictional story of a writer named "Charlie Kaufman" (portrayed by Nicolas Cage), who's trying to adapt the real bestselling nonfiction book The Orchid Thief, by New Yorker writer Susan Orlean (portrayed by Meryl Streep), into a screenplay. But it doesn't go well for Charlie (the character) because he's creatively blocked, besieged with anxiety, and living with his gregarious twin brother, Donald (Cage again), an aspiring screenwriter who constantly gets in his face.

Apparently, when someone hired Kaufman (the writer) to adapt The Orchid Thief, something like that actually happened: Unable to find a way to turn book into movie, he landed on the idea of turning his process of turning-book-into-movie into movie. He even created a twin brother character for himself to suggest his splintered persona, and at the beginning of Adaptation, he shares the screenwriting credit with his faux sibling.

Well, you know what? If Kaufman didn't like Orlean's book (which he clearly didn't), and if he couldn't find a way to adapt it (he clearly couldn't), then he should have just quit the project and told to studio to go fuck itself. Instead, he and Jonze have created an unwatchable collaboration - a movie so indulgent and futile that it's hard to tell what part of it amounts to a bigger hill of beans. (Adaptation, by the way, informs us that Casablanca was the greatest screenplay ever written.) Jonze and Kaufman wink at themselves so much that you'll want to offer them eye drops: They even recreate behind-the-scenes glimpse of the filming of Being John Malkovich, with the stars of that movie returning to play themselves playing themselves. And when you realize that they could easily have saved five million starving children with their film's budget, you might say that Adaptation has blood on its hands.

Orlean's book - written in her magazine's comfortably vivid, matter-of-fact style (or as Charlie calls it, "sprawling New Yorker shit") - revolves around John Laroche, an encyclopedic, self-educated, obsessive-compulsive Florida man who calls himself "the smartest person I know." Orleans discovers Laroche (portrayed by Chris Cooper) when she reads a newspaper account of his arrest for poaching some rare ghost orchids from protected Indian land in Florida. A book grew from her New Yorker article about Laroche, and so did her own obsession with the obsessed: Soon she found herself wondering "how people found order and contentment and a sense of purpose in the universe by fixing their sights on one single thing or one belief or one desire."

And so the obsessions of both Charlie and Kaufman in Adaptation dovetail with the theme of Orlean's book, although certainly not with its cozy literary style. In Laroche's case, the tendency to fixate, which masked his loneliness and psychological mayhem, always focused on external things: fish, fossils and turtles in youth (he wanted to own a Galapagos tortoise), orchids and horticulture as an adult. But in Charlie's case the fixation is frantically solipsistic, which seems a more appropriate metaphor for celebrity filmmaking.

Trouble is, Kaufman's screenplay is a scatterbrained piece of shit. (That's a technical term in Hollywood.) His story moves around in time, from the creation of the universe to flashbacks of Orlean's days with Laroche - her Manhattanite friends engage in smug dinner-party badinage about him - to scenes in the "present," where Charlie tries to adapt her book and deal with his brother, who's writing a grisly thriller using the formula of a gruff screenwriting guru (Brian Cox) who conducts seminars that teach writers how a flashy third act can save a bad movie.

So for Adaptation's grandly parodic (as Donald pronounces it) "de-newey-ment," Kaufman contrives an insipid thriller ending, and when he and Jonze get through dismembering Orlean's book, they've positioned it as a pile of muddled contradictions and philosophical banalities, to which they add a few of their own. The fact that they're just as hard on their own profession hardly redeems their narcissistic and agonizingly dull movie.

If Charlie's telling the truth when he says he has no life, then it's starting to show in Kaufman's work, which repeatedly ponders how people cope with their surroundings and struggle to evolve into something higher (or at least different). But where Being John Malkovich deconstructed its modern culture with wit and intelligence, Adaptation just seems like an masturbatory gestalt session with an overly permissive therapist. In the end one wonders - although one doesn't actually care - why any studio would ask Kaufman to adapt Orlean's book in the first place. His half a dozen funny lines of cultural- and self-analysis would work just as well in a Seinfeld standup act.

Cage has always been a torturously self-absorbed actor, which works well enough when he uses it for comic effect - in Moonstruck, for example. But in serious movies, like Leaving Las Vegas and Adaptation, watching him is about as pleasing as having teeth pulled. As for Streep, it's as if Jonze told her, "Do everything people criticize you for doing, only give it no context." And so Magic Meryl proves that she's brilliant enough to give an utterly useless performance.