Adaptation
Charles Darwin makes a cameo in the latest movie project from writer Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze. If you blink, you'll miss him. But ''Adaptation'' wrestles with the central idea at the heart of Darwin's thinking: the system by which a new species comes into being, be it a sea turtle - or a screenplay.
Don't worry, this is not an episode of ''Nova.'' It's a film by the playful, crafty duo who brought you 1999's ''Being John Malkovich.'' Kaufman himself, in a manner of speaking, is its star.
Tubby, depressive, and played by Nicolas Cage, Kaufman is a screenwriter fighting to extract a movie from a book. When it seems that he can't take being alone with his thoughts a minute longer, he elects to write himself into his script.
The book is Susan Orlean's ''The Orchid Thief,'' an expanded version of her New Yorker profile of John Laroche, an eccentric South Florida orchid breeder. Orlean had already written herself into her story, offering personal asides about her desperate struggle to understand Laroche. So the film has to be big enough for Charlie, for Orlean (Meryl Streep), and for the orchid scavenger (Chris Cooper) she profiled.
There's more, though. To emphasize Charlie's agony, ''Adaptation'' invents his upbeat twin brother, Donald (Cage, again) who is much better at following Hollywood's guidelines than Charlie himself. The film's screenplay is credited to both Kaufmans, though only Charlie really exists.
Like no movie before it, ''Adaptation'' risks everything - its cool, its credibility, its very soul - to expose the horror of making art for the business of entertainment. By the time it's all over, you might even recognize what Kaufman, Jonze, and Cage have accomplished as an old-fashioned triumph of the human spirit. Of course, to get there, the movie has to pull itself through a postmodern, self-reflexive swamp. (And a real swamp, too.)
From scenes of Charlie trying to compose his script, the film oscillates back a few years to Susan's on-site travels with Laroche and her subsequent late nights, toiling to write the book. We get ruminations on the history of flowers, and we're treated to a riotous history-of-the-world montage set at warp speed. These leaps in time are so varied (centuries, months, fantasies that happen outside time) that a grasp of any true starting place is tough. Most scenes are stamped with datelines, but the structure is so complex that you're not inclined to wonder where the film is so much as how it got there.
''Adaptation'' is about movies in the way that ''Malkovich'' was about the actor John Malkovich - the medium is beside the point. Both movies are an attempt to get into someone else's head. But ''Adaptation'' finds the whole experience toxic, ruinous, and alas unnatural, where ''Malkovich'' was an amusement park about the banality of celebrity.
In ''Adaptation,'' several minds are at stake. The only person who doesn't come off his hinges is the schlubby loafer Donald. He's moved into Charlie's Los Angeles bungalow and is a follower of the real screenwriting guru, Robert McKee. He abides by McKee's ''Story: Substance, Style and Structure in Screenwriting,'' a bible of creative evangelism that would-be screenwriters can't do without.
Although it calls comic attention to the Hollywood lunacy, ''Adaptation'' is no conventional satire. The folks you'd send up - Donald and Laroche, who's missing his front teeth and is stark-raving peculiar - are so alive that you can't dismiss them as figments or gags. The movie loves these people too much to mock them. Instead, it jabs at itself in the thunderous voice of Brian Cox as McKee, who - like a hack-writer Zeus - throws lightning bolts of advice at a seminar for screenwriters.
Ostensibly, Donald Kaufman is a McKee hack-olyte who strives to turn out popular schlock, but he's not hung up on the pretense of responsibility the way Charlie is crippled by it. In his own rational, open-minded way, he's right - McKee's commandments work for him. Meanwhile, the earnest Charlie finds Laroche's emotional largesse as awesome as Orlean does.
Cooper is magnificently eccentric in the part. As Orlean, who is on a quest to feel something, Streep does a version of her Isak Dinesen in ''Out of Africa.'' She runs around ''Adaptation,'' chasing a kookier hunter with increasing recklessness. It turns out this sophisticated writer is as lonely as Kaufman, her struggling counterpart. The difference is, she's more willing to experiment. In a beautiful piece of acting, Streep snorts some orchid dust and embarks on one of the great movie highs.
With subtlety and inventiveness, Cage creates two distinct brothers merely by changing how these guys sit or stand. And as Charlie, he makes extraordinary retreats into profound loneliness without resorting to neurotic shtick. Seeing him get lost in a movie like this makes me never again want to see him with a ponytail and mock verve, headlining a Jerry Bruckheimer dude flick.
Charlie is covered in hair and has the posture of a question mark. He's desperate to be freed from his self-cannibalizing paralysis. In Darwinian terms, he's in a struggle for his existence. At one point, he gets out of bed, naked: he looks like a sketch of prehistoric man. So it's not so crazy to consider ''Adaptation'' an adaptation of ''Origin of the Species.'' Read Chapter Three and think about Charlie and Donald - or John and the orchids or, for that matter, Susan, who adapts to people then moves on. It's the nature of her species: the magazine profiler.
This is epic, funny, tragic, demanding, strange, original, boldly sincere filmmaking. And the climax - the portion that either sinks the entire movie or self-critically explains how so many others derail - is bananas.
It's possible to argue that what the finale amounts to is fraud. But really it's the extraordinary act of a film and its makers chewing off their leg to set themselves free. That's ludicrous and desperate and savage. But it's also revolutionary - and highly evolved.
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