Obscure by design and endlessly inventive, in a Soderbergh and Coen kind of way, Spike Jonze’s Adaptation is bottomless self-deprecating Charlie Kaufman acumen in pretentiously poetic form, relieving its wild frustrations with writers block and Hollywood superficiality on unsuspecting audiences. That Adaptation knows this as the very premise is its immense beauty. Toying with the spectators and in a way requiring a beforehand viewing of Being John Malkovich the film is packaged with an obscurity from the set up, primarily alienating those unfamiliar with Kaufman’s style and those all-too-familiar with Nicolas Cage’s fairly recent submission to bland presence. In spite of all these hindrances Adaptation is a near flawless construction of Hollywood self-parody, satirical surreal escapism, and an in-depth study of self-allusion in a sort of dark-premonition-of-cinema’s-future fashion.
Seamless in a fructification of dizzying ideas that weirdly stem from an apocryphally true (or is it?) struggle of inspiration-less madness, Adaptation’s notions firstly state that the Jonze and Kaufman partnership is in itself a grand marriage of the delectably absurd, and a content one at that. It is a type of every-writer’s depiction that parodies suffering processes and still respects them, wryly tackling the lifestyles of both screenwriter and journalist. In something of a Barton Fink vein Adaptation surreptitiously floats philosophical waxing and veers inexhaustibly (unlike Fink) into a subversive terrain of uncharted self-awareness, previously explored by Jonze aned Kaufman with Being John Malkovich. This time the mad geniuses dissect the flabbergasted neurosis, their own synthetic realm, their psyches’, and finally themselves, similarly to Soderbergh’s Full Frontal (analogous but minus what-would-be a censored Jonze walking onto his own Adaptation set), dispelling Full Frontal’s narcissism for a revelation in vitriolic self-berating.
Bona-fide neurotic and eccentric screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (an absolutely stunning Cage, recalling his former days) living in Hollywood, struggling with socialization on and off the Being John Malkovich studio set, signs on to adapt New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean’s (Meryl Streep, simply exceptional) novel The Orchid Thief into a screenplay. Hopelessly hard on himself Kaufman drifts into a writer’s block when deciding that it is nearly impossible to write an entire film about flowers; he begins to long for love, and unsuccessfully discourages his reckless twin brother, Donald, from attempting his own ridiculous screenplay. Meanwhile, three years prior, plastic bourgeois writer Orlean researches the life of John Laroche (Chris Cooper, simply brilliant) for her book, a peculiar Floridian who steals rare orchids via Seminole Native Americans. The curiosities eventually clash, as Charlie attempts to puncture his timidity, Orlean and Laroche become orchid-extracted-drug-addled lovers, and Donald’s screenplay becomes a hit.
That the principal cast of characters is comprised of apparently real-life people, but with their broad characteristics seemingly warped and sardonically reformed, Adaptation emanates realism and yet an imaginative undercurrent of fabrication. As befuddling a reaction as the premise warrants an omnipresent sense for its schizophrenic experimental exercise successfully bypasses the convoluted infrastructure that Kaufman and Jonze ascribe for exhibition, of course, without straying from the material. Though marked by its scathing wit Adaptation is not without its heart and sense of timeless tragedy: the parallel journeys of Charlie and Orlean suggest for both parts, an unforeseen stupefaction in the consciousness of inevitability and metaphysical self-understanding. Exteriorly it tells of a perverse-mind-job, bathing in sibling rivalry and free-spiritedness. But in subtext the film is remarkably heavy in both Darwinism and surrealism, increasingly farcical yet approachably digestible.
To be blunt, I have no idea whether any of the events depict a resembling truth, and aside from Kaufman’s attempt at writing the adaptation, it seems unlikely. (The essential fact that Donald Kaufman never and doesn’t really exist makes this all the more evident.) My theory: fundamentally this tells of Kaufman’s endeavor to adapt a novel into a screenplay but found it beyond difficult thusly deciding to write about the experience, adding a figment of his imagination (Donald) into the mix, his desires (even in such private instances he does not spare himself this personal scolding) as well, and conjures up an outrageous latter half of self-awareness in formula. By its end the odyssey is a self-fulfilling prophecy of false sorts, most of the characters in a strange or tragic way, considering both its irony and circumstance, but nonetheless we’re confident that the illusory Charlie (and real one for that matter) has at lastly been filled with inspiration and minute hope.