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