Monthly Archives: November 2018

  • Adaptation

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Spike Jonze (2002)

    Being John Malkovich, the first collaboration between Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, opened in American cinemas in autumn 1999.  Around the same time, Kaufman completed a draft – not the final draft – of a screenplay for what would be his and Jonze’s next film together.  Being John Malkovich is an original screenplay; Adaptation, as its title suggests, is not.  The source material is Susan Orlean’s non-fiction book The Orchid Thief, described in production notes for Adaptation (included in the programme note for this BFI screening) as ‘discursive, introspective’ and ‘lack[ing] a conventional narrative structure’.  Kaufman remembers, according to the same notes, that, when first commissioned to adapt The Orchid Thief, he was ‘cocky and thinking, yeah, I like this.  I can turn this into a movie’.  Adaptation is – to describe a tricksy piece as simply as possible – a dramatisation of the problems Kaufman had delivering on his commission.

    The title word has a double meaning – both the obvious and a biological sense.  Orlean’s starting point was the arrest in Florida in 1994 of a horticulturist called John Laroche and a group of Seminoles.  Their offence was poaching rare orchids, Laroche’s aim to clone the rare ‘ghost orchid’ for commercial purposes.   Laroche (Chris Cooper) and Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep) are important characters in Adaptation.  So is Donald Kaufman.  An invented personage, he’s the twin brother of the film’s protagonist, Charlie Kaufman (played, like Donald, by Nicolas Cage).  Charlie is depressed:  he thinks he has writer’s block; at any rate, he keeps missing studio deadlines for delivering a screenplay of The Orchid Thief.   His depression intensifies with the arrival of Donald, who moves into his house and, even worse, his vocation.  After attending a seminar run by the legendary (real-life) screenwriting guru Robert McKee, Donald sets to work on a script with alarming energy

    Although he despises Donald’s formulaic approach and clichéd ideas, Charlie can’t clear his writer’s block and his low self-esteem gets even lower.  When Donald sells his ludicrous psychological thriller to Hollywood for a six-figure sum, Charlie himself enrols on a McKee seminar, with humiliating results.  He’s eventually reduced to enlisting Donald’s help in reworking Orlean’s book for the screen.  Adaptation moves to and fro between Charlie’s struggle with The Orchid Thief and dramatised scenes from the script that finally results.  There are also occasional and confounding digressions, played straight and well aware that they’re surplus to requirements.  At one point, Charlie reads a quotation from Charles Darwin and Spike Jonze cuts to ‘England, 139 Years Earlier’ and the great man at his writing desk.  A Darwin voiceover reads the quotation  (‘Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed’).  Then it’s back to Charlie.  One of the chief ways that the adaptation within Adaptation departs from the source material is by inventing an affair between Susan Orlean and John Laroche.   As this develops and Donald’s influence on the plot increases, the narratives of Charlie’s life and of his screenplay begin to coalesce.  Events build to an action-packed finale in a Florida swamp, involving all four principals.  Only Charlie and Susan get out of this alive but the script is complete and Columbia Pictures (who actually distributed Adaptation) are happy.  Charlie even resumes dating Amelia (Cara Seymour), the nice, supportive woman he stopped seeing early in the film.  The closing credits attribute the screenplay to Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman.

    Viewers who don’t get on the wavelength of Spike Jonze’s metafilm are likely to find it extremely annoying.  For those who do get on its wavelength, it’s an unaccountable delight – from Charlie’s opening lament (‘I’m old … I’m fat … I’m bald’) to the closing shot of flowers magically growing in a window box and the Turtles’ ‘Happy Together’ on the soundtrack.  Some people who like most of the movie think it falls apart in the closing stages.  This was my first return to Adaptation since early 2003:  I think, as I thought then, that the eventual collision of elements which had seemed to belong to different levels of the narrative enhances the film as an emotionally supple (and comic) expression of the creative process and its problems.  (In Jonze’s hands, this is also a more effective account of an art-maker’s angst and despair than Synecdoche, New York (2008), where Kaufman himself took the directing reins.)  The apparent confusion is skilfully worked out.  I liked it that Charlie’s preoccupations persist and pervade the story he puts together.  In the Florida swamp, where an alligator has just torn Laroche to pieces, Susan Orlean’s fury at Charlie has a particular emphasis:

    ‘You fat piece of shit!  He’s dead, you hack!  You ruined my life!  You loser!  You’re a goddamn fat hack!’

    The relationship that develops between Laroche and Susan is imaginatively apt and entertaining.  Orlean’s exposure to Laroche and the other orchid enthusiasts she encountered gave her, according to Wikipedia’s entry for The Orchid Thief, ‘a glimpse of true passion for the first time in her life’.  Since the book is being adapted for the movies, where romance is de rigueur, it makes sense that Orlean’s introduction to ‘passion’ is translated in this way (especially with Robert McKee via Donald Kaufman preying on Charlie’s mind).  It transpires that the Seminole were after the ghost orchid for use in manufacture of a drug that induces fascination, to which Laroche introduces Susan.  In one of the film’s highlights, she, alone in her hotel room and high on the drug, tunes in to the telephone dialling tone.  Here’s another instance of picking up an earlier detail, this time to give a sense of the random thoughts that lodge in a writer’s mind and eventually come in handy.  Right at the start, Charlie follows his I’m-old-fat-bald line by reaching for his notebook, catching sight of his bare feet and deciding that ‘My toenails have turned strange’.   Now Susan sits on her hotel bed, contemplating her bare toes in smiling fascination.

    The casting and acting are impeccable.  Nicolas Cage, in by far his best performance, gives Charlie a very funny, sad sack heaviness.  The differences between him and Donald are clearly drawn but never overdone.  Chris Cooper deservedly won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his efforts.  His layered portrait of John Laroche makes the orchid thief thoroughly amusing, distinctively romantic and fundamentally tragic.  (Adaptation includes a truly shocking car accident involving Laroche and his famly.)  It’s good to know that in reality John Laroche is still with us and only in his mid-fifties now (hardly older than Cooper was when the film was made).  Susan Orlean, now in her early sixties, continues to write for the New Yorker, where The Orchid Thief started life as a long article in 1995.  The Wikipedia entry on Adaptation has an amusing section on Orlean’s reactions to finding out how she and her book had been adapted for the screen.  (In summary:  ‘It was certainly scary to see the movie for the first time. It took a while for me to get over the idea that I had been insane to agree to it, but I love the movie now’.)   It’s a consequence of Meryl Streep’s extraordinary versatility that she sometimes gives the impression of trying out different ways of playing a role without having quite decided on one in particular.  This quality works perfectly in Adaptation:  Susan Orlean is often reflected through Charlie Kaufman’s increasingly insecure and ambivalent feelings about her or in his imagination of her in the screenplay that he’s trying to write.  There’s great chemistry between Streep and Chris Cooper.  In smaller roles, Cara Seymour, Tilda Swinton (as a studio executive), Maggie Gyllenhaal (a passing love interest of Donald’s) and Brian Cox (Robert McKee) all do fine work.  Carter Burwell’s score is unobtrusively right.

    8 October 2018

  • The Guilty

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Den skyldige

    Gustav Möller (2018)

    The setting of Gustav Möller’s The Guilty is a police control room in Copenhagen.  Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren) is on the evening shift there, answering emergency phone calls and initiating follow-up action to them.   It quite soon emerges that Asger is due to appear in court the next day regarding an incident that led to his suspension from normal police duties and assignment to the control room.  He takes a call from a woman, Iben (Jessica Dinnage), who seems to have been kidnapped by her estranged husband Michael (Johan Olsen).  They’re on the road, in his van; their two young children are still at home.  On Asger’s advice, Iben, as they converse, pretends to be talking to her six-year-old daughter so as not to arouse Michael’s suspicions.  After his shift has ended, Asger moves into an adjoining office, where he continues to makes calls, on a police phone and on his own.  When fellow police officers go to Ibn’s apartment, they find the other child, a baby boy, dead and apparently murdered.

    From a call he makes to his colleague Rashid (Omar Shargawi), we learn that Asger’s wife has recently left him and that Rashid will be giving evidence – false evidence – on his behalf in court.  The nature of the incident that caused Asger’s suspension isn’t revealed until a few minutes before the end of The Guilty.  His reactions to the other calls he takes express near-contempt for the callers – among them, a drug addict and a man who’s been robbed in a red light district.  This partly reflects Asger’s frustration with the demeaning job he’s currently doing.  It’s soon clear that he’s used to issuing orders.  In fact, he can’t stop doing so:  preoccupied with trying to help Iben, he exceeds his control room responsibilities.

    This Danish film takes place not only in a single interior location but also in virtually real time.  Its effectiveness as a drama depends greatly on these two features.   Of the four actors mentioned above, all except Jakob Cedergren are heard but never seen.  The Guilty, written by the director and Emil Nygaard Albertsen, isn’t a work of great imagination.  Though the plot is neatly constructed and worked out, it doesn’t come as a major surprise that Asger misunderstands Iben’s situation and, in trying to make things better, makes them worse.  But the film is absorbing, commendably compact (85 minutes) and fortified by a fine lead performance.   I saw The Guilty at Curzon Bloomsbury just an hour or so after watching Widows there.  The intentional and intelligent claustrophobia of Möller’s movie was welcome after a term of imprisonment with Steve McQueen’s protracted, explosive, tumid one.

    In a lukewarm review in the TLS, Adam Mars-Jones likens The Guilty to ‘a supercharged radio play rather than an authentically cinematic experience’.   It’s true that, as Mars-Jones also says, the sound design is one of the film’s chief assets but the visual simplicity and immobility have a pull of their own.  (A rare moment of dynamic movement is also a rare forced moment:  Asger, eventually realising his mistake, furiously throws office furniture around in a way that seems bound to attract the attention of colleagues in the adjoining control room but doesn’t.)  The Guilty is definitely a substantial screen experience.  Whether it would lose anything as a television rather than a cinema piece is more arguable but the ambience of a film theatre certainly sharpens awareness of the piece’s formal distinctiveness in a way that a living-room armchair seat would not.

    Mars-Jones describes Jakob Cedergren’s face as ‘blandly handsome’, which may largely explain why he found the film, in which that face is the dominant image, underwhelming.  I’d be surprised if many viewers see the main actor as Mars-Jones does.  Cedergren’s long, bony countenance has a deep-set belligerence that’s both interesting and intimidating.  It’s obviously crucial that he doesn’t reveal things too quickly and he’s very good at encouraging us to read his character in different ways.  Rightly so, because Asger’s motives are so mixed:  in his efforts to help Iben, he’s trying to do the right thing, to resume the proper police work he’s been prevented from doing and, it gradually becomes clear, somehow to atone for the incident that’s landed him in court.  It struck me as surprising that Asger was on duty on the eve of a morning court appearance but I didn’t find it hard to accept this is as dramatic necessity.  Besides, it’s increasingly easy to believe that his prolongation of the control room stint is partly a means of postponing what’s in the diary the next day.

    Michael and Iben turn out to be heading to a psychiatric hospital in Elsinore – a location that, for a non-Danish viewer anyway, brings Hamlet unhelpfully, almost comically, to mind.  That’s hardly Gustav Möller’s fault, though, and he handles the closing stages splendidly.  Just when Asger thinks he’s responsible for another death, a voice on the other end of the phone tells him that Iben is safe and congratulates Asger on his good work.   In the film’s last scene, as he prepares to exit the control room area, he makes one more phone call – to whom we don’t know:  the call hasn’t been answered by the time the screen goes dark.  This concluding attempt to make contact makes emotional sense.  The events of the evening may have finished Asger’s career.  Yet the experience, including what he confesses to Iben, is also cathartic.  He leaves the office both more and less isolated than he was when the shift began.

    13 November 2018

Posts navigation