Mind-Bending Adaptation. a Little Too Clever For Me

We writers are a strange breed. But hopefully most of us aren't quite as strange as Charlie Kaufman, the lauded screenwriter responsible for several mind-bending movies, among them Adaptation., in which he is also the main character, played by Nicholas Cage. Cage also plays Kaufman's twin brother Donald, who initially comes across as lackadaisical but by the end seems to have his life much more together than Charlie does. Which is a shame, since Donald doesn't exist, leaving us only with a man who seems at serious risk of losing control of his mental faculties.

I pity Charlie Kaufman in this film. I'm sure he's been fictionalized, as unreliable as everything else we might presume to be true in what is supposedly a non-fictional account of Kaufman's struggles to adapt Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, but it takes a brave man to write such a pathetic version of himself into a movie, to make himself out to be a man embroiled in paranoia and obsession, capable of churning out brilliant screenplays but only after months of agonizing writer's block, scarcely able to function as a social being, as evidenced by his interaction with his more charismatic brother and his lamentable attempt to score a date with a perky waitress at the diner he frequents.

Spike Jonze directs this film that is part action-adventure - mostly toward the end, when a seriously unhinged Orlean (Meryl Streep), with the help of eccentric orchid bandit John Laroche (Chris Cooper, in a wildly engaging performance that won him an Oscar), decides Kaufman must die because he knows too much - and part PSA for anyone who ever imagined the writing lifestyle to be glamorous. It's enough to make a fledgling writer reconsider her career path.

The film earns its R rating with profanity aplenty and bits of nudity and violence. It earns its many screenwriting honors with a maddeningly original screenplay. I say maddening because it causes me to question my own sense of reality. Ever since I read The Princess Bride and was taken in by William Goldman's long, drawn-out search for S. Morgenstern's book of the same title and his subsequent determination to write a "good parts" version for his son, I have felt a sense of betrayal when I can't take authors at their word. I almost believed that Charlie Kaufman had a twin brother who died while helping him adapt The Orchid Thief; then I almost believed Susan Orlean didn't exist, though I recalled seeing her book on the shelves of the bookstore where I work. I find this deeply disconcerting.

Adaptation. is an intriguing film. It probably merits another watching, but I'm not that eager to plunge once more into such a perplexing movie populated by such bizarre characters. Instead, I think I'll just agree that Charlie Kaufman is a genius. And if this is the cost of brilliance, maybe I can handle being mediocre.