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Adaptation.

Image / Year: 2002

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From the liner notes

Director Spike Jonze delivers a stunningly original comedy that seamlessly blends fictional characters and situations with the lives of real people: obsessive orchid hunter John Laroche (Chris Cooper), New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), Hollywood screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage), and his twin brother, Donald (also Nicolas Cage). As Charlie struggles to adapt Orlean's best–selling book The Orchid Thief, he writes himself into his own movie. The various stories crash into one another exploding into a wildly imaginative film. Adaptation., the year's most talked about movie, is at once a hilarious drama and a moving comedy.

Review

Adaptation of a species to a planet, adaptation of a book to a screenplay, adaptation of the individual to society... Adaptation. considers it all, over millennia, between brothers, in the swamp primeval. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage), a ghost on the set of his own movie is approached to write the adaptation of The Orchid Thief, written by Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), a New Yorker writer with the quintessential, New York literary life. The story moves between Kaufman's tortured existence, of which his writing experience is only one aspect, and Orlean's experience in the Everglades researching the book. John Laroche (Chris Cooper), the orchid thief in question, impacts Orlean's ordered sanity with the gritty force of emotive spontaneity. Meanwhile, Kaufman struggles with an inability to commit and a massive writer's block, while his (fictional) twin brother Donald (Nicolas Cage delivers the best twins since Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers) connects to others with easy glee and whips out a hackneyed potboiler that sells immediately. The intellectuals vie with the experientials, leading the viewer into frenzied considerations of life, its origins and meaning, with quirky and inexplicably endearing abstraction.

Episodic, nonlinear, straddling the gap between inner truths and outer presentation, Adaptation. makes maximum use of its superlative cast, including the incomparable Streep, who can convey a subtle, fleeting emotion with a subtle, fleeting glance; and Oscar–winner Cooper, who presents a fully fleshed character the instant he shows up on screen. When the film changes tone from Charlie's cerebral meandering to Donald's visceral conventionality, the actors keep the human authenticity intact. A must see.

-- Ann Yarabinee