Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
This movie shook me.
I read the script last year. I read a few early reviews. I walked into the theater pretty sure I knew what I was going to see.
And I was wrong. Almost entirely wrong. See, I underestimated Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman. I expected something surreal and genre-bending and provocative, and it’s all of that, but it’s more. What I saw hit me in a deep, personal place and left me reeling as I staggered to my car afterwards. I took a few minutes before I even started the engine, trying to explain what I was feeling to my girlfriend, who could see that I was having a complicated reaction. The DGA is less than five minutes from my house, but in those five minutes, driving home, I began to shake. It felt like a shock wave was hitting me. By the time we reached my driveway, there were tears in my eyes, and I almost had to be helped inside. She talked me down over the next couple of hours, both of us digging into the film and what it makes you think about, simply letting it take us wherever it was going to, enjoying it as one of those rare film experiences, a total immersion.
ADAPTATION is like nothing else I’ve seen in recent memory. It is a complete original. It burrowed under my skin and worked its way into my entire system as I watched it, and no matter what I’ve watched since, ADAPTATION is what I continue to think about. I feel like I do on the far side of my first experiment in altered consciousness all those years ago, like I’ve just opened some new doorway in my brain, and I don’t know where it might lead, but I know it will be someplace I’ve never been before. I think the reason it made me so emotional after seeing it is because ADAPTATION is also one of the bravest pieces of film art I’ve ever seen. And it was made and released by a studio.
I think the word I’m looking for starts with an “m,” but it’s not “masterpiece”.
I think the word I’m looking for is “miracle”.
For one thing, I had given up on Nicolas Cage. It came to a head not long after he won the Oscar for LEAVING LAS VEGAS, but it had been brewing for a while. I still remember the charge of seeing VALLEY GIRL in the theater when it opened and wondering who this remarkable bag of freak was. RACING WITH THE MOON and BIRDY were both films I really liked when they came out, but it was the back to back punch of PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED and RAISING ARIZONA that convinced me that Cage was one of the best, someone worth paying close attention to. MOONSTRUCK, VAMPIRE’S KISS, and WILD AT HEART were gifts for the faithful, films that we could point at to prove that Cage was the one defining whatever envelope there was to push in acting. He was Crispin Glover crazy, but he managed to get the leads in these films. The things he tried were either inspired or retarded, and that fine line is what made him so fascinating.
And then he hit a dry spell. And for Cage, a dry spell can be a majestic, horrifying thing, full of films so terrible they defy description. Films like ZANDALEE and FIREBIRDS and GUARDING TESS and IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU and TRAPPED IN PARADISE. I started to wince when I would hear his name, and it was only the occasional RED ROCK WEST that gave me hope. His collaboration with Mike Figgis yielded one of his very best performances, and he deserved that Oscar. He made self-destruction a spectator sport, and he managed to give real, angry voice to a character that almost no one else could have made sympathetic. I hoped that Oscar sent him a message about his gifts as an actor, that it rewarded him for doing that same sort of brave, on the edge work that defined him at the start of his career. I hoped it was the start of a second, better stage in his filmography.
And instead, I got THE ROCK and FAMILY MAN and CON AIR and CITY OF ANGELS and GONE IN 60 SECONDS, and somewhere in there, I just gave up. I just got tired of watching him piss away these prime years of his life, when he’s still young enough to do almost anything. He was no longer an actor, as far as I was concerned. He was a movie star. To me, the difference is that movie stars play themselves, or some slight variation on themselves, while actors vanish into their roles, becoming someone else.
In ADAPTATION, Nicolas Cage The Actor comes roaring back to life, creating not one but two of the year’s most interesting characters, giving the best performance as twins since Jeremy Irons in Cronenberg’s seminal DEAD RINGERS. First, there’s Charlie Kaufman, the film’s lead. We see the world through his eyes, and it’s positively deranged of him to make himself a character in this film. I am surrounded by evidence of his reality. Right now, I’ve got an invitation on my desk for a set of screenings of CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND, written by Charlie Kaufman. I’ve got an advance DVD for review of HUMAN NATURE, written by Charlie Kaufman. And sitting on my stack of scripts to be read is ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, the latest and hottest script by... yes... Charlie Kaufman. He’s a real person, but after seeing this film, I don’t know if there’s room for a different face than the one Cage gives him. He’s got a remarkable coiff, a strange sort of thinning orangey afro, his skull showing clearly through it from most angles. He is hunched, pushed over, like someone’s got their thumb on him. When we first get a glimpse of Charlie, he’s hanging back, on the edge of things behind the scenes on BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, which is being directed by Spike Jonze. We see a startling recreation of the production of that film, with Malkovich himself making a heartfelt plea on behalf of the extras in the scene. Charlie walks outside, feeling like he’s in the way, and we see him plunge headlong into life as a “hot” screenwriter. I typically hate movies about filmmaking because the details are always exaggerated, cartoonish, inaccurate. People prefer to play the stereotypes instead of the way things really are, even though they know better. In this film, Jonze and Kaufman achieve an effortless, perfect portrayal of life in modern Los Angeles working in films. This is the way it feels.
And based on the portrayal, you’d guess that it doesn’t always feel good. Kaufman is insecure, even in his success, and he feels a constant pressure to produce according to expectations. As I type right now, I glance down at my fingers on the keys, and I see that the nails on several of the fingers are chewed down to the quick and even past, ragged and awful. I’m stressed right now, working about sixteen hours a day, and I’m terrible to myself at times on some subconscious level. There’s something about the horror of facing a blank page that does this to people.
Cage’s other performance, as Charlie’s twin brother Donald, is remarkable because of how easy it is to simply accept him as a separate person from Charlie. The FX work by Gray Matter FX is exceptional, nuanced and sophisticated, and they’ve laid these two people into the same frame in a way that Bob Zemeckis could only dream of as recently as BACK TO THE FUTURE 2 (1989). They interact. They play off of each other in unexpected ways. They couldn’t be more different in the way they attack life. Charlie is the strong one in some ways. After all, he’s the one who has the movie in production, the one who has the house in the Hollywood Hills. Donald doesn’t even have a home of his own. He has to crash with his brother. He seems to embody everything that Charlie hates about the business he works in. Donald talks about “The Industry” and he quotes Robert McKee, a guy who gives seminars on screenwriting, and he seems to believe there is some magic formula that you can just copy that will give you a great script, guaranteed.
But there’s one way that Donald is completely superior to Charlie. He has the ability to connect with people. He meets the makeup girl (Maggie Gyllenhaal) on the set of BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, and they fall into the exact sort of light, casual relationship that Charlie dreams of, but seems incapable of initiating. There’s a heartbreaking subplot involving Judy Greer as a waitress at a local diner, and a major part of the film deals with the friendship Charlie has with Amelia (Cara Seymour), a lovely British girl who obviously cares about him. He can feel the tension between them. He even seems like he wants to make the right move and connect with her, but he’s frozen, paralyzed by himself and his own self-image and his fear of failure, and he never quite works up the nerve. He never quite says the right thing. And when he sees the way Donald is able to make those connections, it tears him up inside. It manifests as a sort of thinly veiled contempt for his brother.
Charlie gets hired to adapt a book called THE ORCHID THIEF into a script by Valerie (Tilda Swinton), who does a spot-on-perfect job as a development executive. Her first meeting with Kaufman is eerily accurate, right down to the almost inappropriate level of zeal that Charlie shows when he talks about how he’d approach adapting the book.
Of course, as soon as he gets the job, he freezes. I’ve had my fair share of sleepless nights recently as the enormity of the job I’m doing for Revolution really started to hit me. There have been all sorts of things going on that have really turned the pressure up for my writing partner and me. It’s a great thing, but it’s also terrifying in that jump-out-of-an-airplane sort of way. You just have to have faith that the chute’s going to open. You have to trust that you’ll find your voice and the script will come to life. Charlie begins the process of converting THE ORCHID THIEF into screenplay form, and as he does, we’re drawn into the world of the book, just as he is.
It’s a nonfiction story, expanded from an article that originally ran in THE NEW YORKER, by Susan Orleans (Meryl Streep). It concerns John Laroche (Chris Cooper), a charismatic figure who was arrested for removing rare plants from a Florida preserve. It was part of a larger plan by Laroche to breed these plants, including the elusive ghost orchid, using local Seminole Indians to handle the plants in an effort to circumvent local wildlife laws thanks to a loophole. At first, Laroche is an anecdote that she tells to great comic effect at a dinner party, but she is drawn to him. She becomes completely absorbed in her efforts to understand him.
And as he writes this, as he starts to piece the story together, Charlie Kaufman finds himself drawn to Orleans. He becomes completely absorbed in his efforts to understand her. The parallel between how he approaches his work and how Orleans approaches her work can’t be missed, but it’s the differences between them that distinguish them. Susan’s part of the world. She’s got a life. She’s got a husband. She works with other people at this magazine, a social creature. Charlie is fascinated by her because of the world she seems to symbolize to him. Her book is beautifully written, moving, and it impacts Charlie deeply. Still, he can’t quite hand himself over, heart and soul, to what he’s writing, and that’s the step that really brings something to life. So much of my work week is dedicated not to the act of writing, but the creation of the right space in which to write. It’s a process of shutting out the world. It’s a process of slipping completely into this thing you’ve created. It’s crucial. Charlie’s problem is that he writes in circles, so obssessed with the work that he begins to double back on himself.
When Charlie comes up with the notion of writing himself into the script, and he begins to write the film that we’ve been watching the entire time, it’s a moment so strange, so completely odd that it wouldn’t seem possible for an audience to maintain any real sense of sympathy for the characters onscreen. I mean, it’s such a self-referential, inside-joke type idea, clever to a fault. It is a testament to the considerable gifts of Kaufman and Jonze and Cage that the considerable tonal shifts in the film all seem to work. The concept takes a particularly daring turn in the last third of the film, and it’s this section that is causing considerable controversy with some viewers. People either buy what happens, and they allow themselves to feel the experience intuitively, or they resist, they fight it, and they let themselves get derailed. I think it’s wonderful. I think it’s horrible. I think it makes you feel very, very deeply for a character who should be a two-dimensional cartoon, but somehow isn’t. I think the use of Robert McKee as a character is the single most inside joke I’ve ever seen in a studio film, but I think it makes perfect thematic sense, and it’s not a stunt in any way. I think it’s brave. I think it subverts expectation by fulfilling certain expectations to a fault. I think it’s both obvious and broad and somehow subtle at the same time. It’s a triumph, and it will piss many, many people off.
Make sure you stay till the very end. The last few moments of the film are the punchline to the entire thing, and they’re worth sitting for those few extra moments and letting this movie wash over you. Lance Acord (BUFFALO 66, BEING JOHN MALKOVICH) is the director of photography, and he’s working in a very particular palette that manages to create as distinct a world as the best work by The Coen Brothers or David Lynch. This is style as substance. Everything counts. Every level of the image and the performances. Chris Cooper is spectacular as Laroche, ferocious and filled with child-like wonder and burned out distraction and sudden, mercurial anger, all in equal measure. It’s the most vivid performance he’s ever given. There’s a disturbingly real prosthetic he wears as Laroche, his front teeth all smashed out and never replaced. There’s a moment that explains those teeth that is as horrifying a moment as I’ve seen in recent memory, shocking and sudden and real, and it almost sent me scurrying for cover when I saw it.
Credit for this film must ultimately rest on the shoulders of Spike Jonze, who continues to prove himself one of the most singular voices of his generation, able to work in three-minute music videos and features with equal impact. He’s capable of directing the year’s most cerebral exercise in high comedy, yet he also produced and appeared in the year’s most deliriously lowbrow big studio film, JACKASS. It’s that range that makes him dangerous, and there’s the sense that he’s enjoying his career more than anyone else will ever enjoy it. He’s got his own private joke, so dense and brilliant that he can’t possibly share the whole thing. We get crumbs. We get the bits he can spare. As great as ADAPTATION is, I still get the sense he’s warming up. It’s just too effortless. He understands the comic rhythms of Charlie Kaufman on an almost chemical level, the same way Charlie finally finds the true heart of Susan Orleans, the same way Kaufman somehow maps his own heart. By the end of the film, Charlie has made a major step forward. He’s been transformed by his own work. He’s beaten back self-doubt and fear and he’s created something that fills him with pride. It’s given him a better sense of his own voice. And, for the first time, he finds the courage to use that voice. And it’s still scary, and what happens isn’t exactly what he hopes for, but at least it happens. At least it’s real. At least Charlie’s finally committed to life. He has adapted. He is changed, and in that change... in all change... there is the potential for something great. That greatness, however transitory, however elusive, is all we can hope for, and it seems that for everyone in this film, it is in that trying, in the struggle itself, that grace is found.
Trust me... ADAPTATION is one of this season’s finest gifts, and I sincerely hope you find that it’s just your size when you try it on.
"Moriarty" out.
