#91 - Adaptation

I loves me some Charlie Kaufman. I loved Being John Malkovich. I thoroughly enjoyed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I haven't seen his others. What I love about his movies is how he is able to take an abstract concept and present it in a naturalistic setting using masterful levels of humor and quirkiness. What you then get is a movie that has interweaving elements of humor that is not quite at a dark comedy level, abstraction that's completely real to the world that has been created, and a surreality that actually combines the two together. He does not juxtapose reality and abstraction in order for us to step away from reality and view the differences through a lens. Instead, through his use of surreality, he combines the two together so that we can see, feel, and learn from the inside. On the surface we are given the unusual, the odd, the quirky, the offbeat, the peculiar. But more importantly, we are given a foundation of internal honesty that is at the very core of everything he presents to us. It's fantastic. It's dynamic. It's infinitely entertaining, and this movie may be the most honest of the ones I have seen because it is so introspective.

Let's see, how to describe this movie? The movie is based on the book The Orchid Thief, so you have that story involved, but the main character is actually Charlie Kaufman himself. Stick with me here, but the actual story of the movie Adaptation is about Charlie Kaufman writing the screenplay for the movie Adaptation. How good is that? Seriously. Wrap your brain around that for a bit. Is that not the best thing you have heard of in a while? At first, you think that the clips of the story you see is what he is writing. Pretty straightforward storytelling. Nothing different there. But, much of what we see at first is Kaufman's struggles with adapting a book that really isn't a story into a story without going too Hollywood with it. What's fascinating about this is that you, the viewer, know that he is writing the movie you are watching, but Charlie Kaufman the character does not. That's all I am going to say about the story. The last quarter of the movie is fantastic, especially once you realize what is going on. I give you the premise. I tell you it's good. But you must go see the movie, because it is even better than what I have said here, and besides, trying to explain it all would take longer than I am willing to give. And you should see it anyways.

A couple of things I want to touch on here. First, as good as Charlie Kaufman is at writing, I am eternally thankful that there are delightful lunatics out there in the world like Spike Jonze to make the writing work. I am also eternally thankful that there can be at least one music video director that doesn't make shitty looking movies, and the movies he chooses to make are Charlie Kaufman's. Secondly, the character of Charlie's brother Donald is fantastic. You see, Donald isn't a real person, yet he is credited as a co-writer, was nominated for an Oscar, and actually has an imdb.com page. That is terrific. And the fake brother being Charlie's internal alter ego with a Hollywood mentality is great. And he's Charlie's twin, also played by Nicolas Cage, and here's the crazy thing, they play well off of each other. How is that possible? The interaction Cage has with his two characters is tremendous and I can't even begin to think about how difficult that is to play off of somebody that you are going to play later. This is one of those movies that Nicolas Cage does that can make me forget and forgive the piles of turd he puts out there like Con Air and Gone In Sixty Seconds. These are the kinds of things he should be remembered for.