Adaptation - A Movie

Like being inside of a writers mind. Crazy complex.  A paradox you know.....I'd say writers are way up there in clarity.......but then clarity doesn't come from nowhere.....it's just about digging deeper and deeper into the selves, and that's where it gets intense, and as intriguing too. 

It's taken me a week to get down to writing about this. Guess it took that long to let the complexity settle and the theme or rather themes unravel themselves. There's a crazy level of genius and a medley of emotions in there, and it's not easy putting that in simple frame.

Let me actually get to the movie....

The movie happens at multiple levels of reality; it's much inside the head of Charlie Kaufman, a screenplay writer trying to adapt a book from the mind of another equally complex author, Susan Orlean who has in turn written about this eccentric orchid hunter, John Laroche. And within each are their own relationships. Susan is attracted to John and his passions, and then the story of Charlies involvement in her life, and so getting dragged into the murky drug involved love affair between Susan Orleans and John. Underlying all of this is Charlie's relationship with his bother; his identical twin Donald,  a fictional alter ego in constant conversation with Charlie through the movie. 

I know that's crazy complex, but then, I can't help it...so's the movie :)

It messes with your mind, but then it's also eccentric genius I guess, because it walks you through that complexity with skill and ingenuity.

Nicolas Cage is exceptional as Charlie and Donald, himself with his deepest fears, inadequacies, insecurities, anxieties, and dealing with his antithetical self, one that is a nonchalant, ambitious, casual, and fun facet.  Like he's at one time calling himself narcissistic and also pathetic, and how he is more comfortable in his elemental self than the fun self, while yet being both. And it's not funny. On the one hand, he can't seem to keep his own girlfriend, while his fictional self seems to get any girl he desires with just that no effort.

Susan Orleans, played by Meryl Streep, again a simple, classy, dignified author and journalist, with a job with New York times, a happy marriage and then drawn to Jon Laroche a crazy, charismatic, don't care about anything but my passion kind of guy, and how she finds her own protected life pale in comparison and goes in search of her own passions through Jon.

The lives of Charlie, Susan, Jon and Donald get interwoven as each ones search for meaning and passion runs into the others. You move in and out of different realities. In the final call, all adaptations seem to fall off and then everyone merges into this one morbid reality which is symbolically pictured in a swamp, and how it just twists itself around and your mind with it. I like happy endings you see...that's why the week.

Adaptation, I think, is also a huge play on Pun...in fact several times over. It's not just Adaptation of a book to a screenplay, but also Adaptation of people to situations, the orchid symbolically used through Darwin's theory of evolution, how the orchid and the insect adapt to each other, and I guess each one of their minds adapting to evolve, wait evolving to adapt.....whichever :)

It's storytelling at a different level. Don't let this review put you off. It's a worthy watch if you'll admit to the layers within.