Adaptation: A Brief Review

A review of Spike Jonze’s promising film written right after watching it.  I no longer agree with everything I wrote but here it is, preserved in self-flagellation.
  April 6, 2003

Spike Jonze is too clever for his own good.  So are the movies he directs.  From 1999, Being John Malkovich and now Adaptation are both based on neat ideas that unfortunately flourished to the detriment of everything else.  In the case of Adaptation the victims are the plot (a flower doomed in Jonze’s postmodern gardens anyway), the viewer’s patience, and ultimately, meaning.

Adaptation is a strange, overstuffed, almost wonderful double-decker of a film.  I call it a double-decker because it operates on at least two levels.  First, it struggles to bring to screen Susan Orlean’s novel The Orchid Thief—and fails.  Second, it cleverly focuses on discussing its failure as a means of escaping it—and triumphs for a while, until the cleverness goes too far.  Thus, in the end, it fails all around.  The enterprise was doomed from the start.

What spelled its doom?  To find out, let’s look at the plot.  The film (whose script was written by Jonze’s favorite collaborator, Charles Kaufman, and credited, importantly, both to him and a Donald Kaufman) begins with the main character, a Hollywood screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman, being unable to turn Orlean’s novel into a screenplay.  Charlie is full of self-loathing and insecurities that preoccupy him far more than the book does; so much more, in fact, that he inserts himself into his own narrative and takes over the story.  He realizes that in so doing he has strayed into dangerous territory, and in the second half of the movie he enlists the writing help of his twin brother Donald, a hack bent on churning out blatantly commercial scripts.  Together they desperately try to dig deeper into the story to find material that would animate it for the audiences.  In their search, they start stalking Susan Orlean and discover that she has gotten deeply involved with her novel’s criminal hero; she now leads a secret second life of drugs and pornography.  Unfortunately, the brothers are found out, Orlean and her lover go berserk, and Donald loses his life.  Charlie, however, survives the ordeal to come out a better man infused with a new hope in something or other.  Flowers, sunset, credits.

People complained that the second, campy half of the film goes with the first like apples go with oranges.  What they fail to see is the logic behind it.  In the short-circuited world of Adaptation, fantasy emulates reality but reality in turn emulates fantasy.  Charles Kaufman writes a script about Charlie Kaufman writing a script about Charlie Kaufman writing a script, ad infinitum, but another writer, Donald, lurks in this universe of mirrors.  The campiness begins precisely after the point in the plot when Donald comes in to help.  Something interesting happens here: Kaufman could have simply modified his original clever trick; he could have shown us, in a campy ending, Donald taking the reins and writing a campy ending about Donald writing a campy ending, etc.  Instead, Kaufman goes one step further.  We don’t see Donald write anything, yet the jarring, inexplicable schlock of the finale suggests that we are, in fact, watching Donald’s creation, the very contribution he was brought in to provide.

I briefly polled some innocent bystanders.  None had cracked the puzzle of Adaptation’s ending.  Had such a person turned up, he would have been interested to learn that in real life, Charles Kaufman doesn’t have a brother.  This is ingenuity at its craftiest: the author has created a nigh-impenetrable allusion to the never written work of a non-existent person.

So what’s wrong, one may ask, with a film that is obviously smart and enjoyable, if a bit abstruse?  It’s the fact that apples and oranges really don’t go together.  Charles Kaufman tries his best to make Donald’s creation authentic—a task impossible by definition, but necessitated by the crazy logic of his plot.  He scores a Pyrrhic victory: he gets as close to his goal as he can but thereby butchers the movie.  He first draws us in with the obviously realistic plight of his cinematic double; we believe him, pity him, feel in comfortable complicity with his artful design, perhaps exchange friendly winks.  Then, without any warning, he throws us into the disorienting spin of Susan Orlean’s outrageously fantastic escapades and makes us feel like fools.  We start suspecting that he was never our friend, that he simply put us off guard with feigned honesty the better to humiliate us by this dunk into a steaming pile of kitsch.  The hurt of betrayed trust will alienate about two thirds of the viewers who won’t understand the ending’s structural purpose; the remaining third will be lost due to the purpose’s joyless execution.  The grasp of the structural demands won’t make up for the chagrin at the content demanded: that of a tasteless late-night TV flick.

You still should see Adaptation.  Despite the glaring flaw that I have described, it is full of delights and surprises that are a pleasure to savor and, for me at least, will warrant repeated viewings (on video this time).  It has superb acting.  It’s witty, funny and erudite—I particularly liked the joke about a serial-killer English Lit professor who cuts his victims into little pieces and calls himself the Deconstructionist.  Its first hour and a half are as great as anything that has come out of Hollywood in the recent years.  This could have been one hell of a film, yet it fell short.  A crying shame, that.

Among other goodies, Kaufman casually tosses at us a reference to Ouroboros, Gnosticism’s universal serpent that swallows its own tail.  This is hardly accidental: he must have meant his movie as at least a part of the allusion.  He got it right except for one detail: Adaptation is Ouroboros confused, a serpent whose tail ended up swallowing its head.

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