Adaptation: An Imperfect Vacuum

Adaptation is about nothing but whether its screen writer and director, Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, can top themselves. They don't.

The last time out, the pair created Being John Malkovich, a self-consciously bizarre tale that played with paradoxes of identity the way scifi plays with paradoxes of time travel: suppose you could experience John Malkovich without being John Malkovich. That movie followed the self-referential loops to their illogically inevitable ends.

So, how do you follow that up? You write a movie that flouts the next level down of Hollywood conventions: Not just no car chases but also no character development, no epiphanies in which people come to self-realizations that change them, no character arcs. But wouldn't that make for a really boring movie? That's precisely the challenge. Kaufman's solution to the problem he's posed himself — which ultimately seems to be to prove that Malkovich wasn't just a lucky shot — is to write a script about writing a script in which nothing happens...and then amuse us with circles of self-reference.

Some of the circles work; the script Kaufman-the-character is writing is an adaptation of a book about orchids that has characters and an undramatic narrative but that is really simply about the wonder that flowers exist. Thus, in writing a movie in which there's no character or plot development he is indeed meditating on the difficulty of writing about the is-ness of nature. And the last section of the movie is a grand joke. (I think what I'm about to say won't give anything away, but you might want to skip the rest of this paragraph anyway.) Nevertheless, the joke goes on too long. Worse, the joke betrays what was interesting about the movie in terms of content — a bit as if Kaufman had ended Malkovich by assuring us that it was all just a dream.

We are left with the immediate pleasures and disappointments of the movie as it's unfolded: Some funny overvoices that struck me as painfully true about what goes through a writer's mind, some terrific acting by Chris Cooper, the radiant presence of Meryl Streep, the enjoyable hamminess of Nicolas Cage, a parody of the sort of Big Message typical of the movies that this one feels superior to. But we also have a whole bunch of cheap shots — ooh, a Hollywood agent who's a slime ball! oh, someone writing a stupid screenplay about a serial killer! — a predictable ending, and a smug insistence on originality even at the cost of pointlessness.

It's worth seeing. It's not boring. It's also less deep than it thinks it is. Next time let's hope Kaufman decides to write about something.

Article Author: David Weinberger

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