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ADAPTATION
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Try. Fail once. Try again. Fail better.
-- A writer's mantra
Creating something new requires, in addition to an unwavering commitment to emotional honesty, a suspension of disbelief as powerful as Wile E. Coyote's – you have a vision, you start running, you build up momentum and run into empty space beyond a cliff – and you don't look down, else whoosh, splat. But like Wile E., if we are interrupted in mid-flight, we do look down, and we splat.
Inside our crowded psyches reside two people:
Everybody has these two poles and nobody knows exactly why. Freud tied them to the id and the superego, Julian Jaynes to the two halves of the brain. The original Star Trek rang numerous changes on this with good-Kirk versus evil-Kirk. But we do know that, just as enjoying fiction requires suspension of disbelief, creating it requires the assumption of belief: You can't write well unless you think you can write brilliantly. So you delude yourself, or fib to yourself, or distract yourself (some of us call it "Fooling the watcher"), anything to squelch the critic long enough to make the exuberant pandemonic swirls, long enough for Wile E. Coyote to pinwheel his legs to the cliff's other side, and then look back, and build a bridge out of that ectoplasmic rope his tracks have just made in the empty space.
Splat often and painfully enough and you have writer's block. Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage), the screenwriter-hero of Adaptation, has gone splat big time. He has been dazzled at lunch by his movie-executive friend Valerie (The Deep End's Tilda Swinton, looking prettier and more personable than in any of her movies) and taken on an impossible project: writing a screenplay for a book that is an extended essay (itself inflated from a magazine article) with no plot, no conflict arc, no resolution – for that matter, no car chases, no explosions, no love story, and no special effects! Obsessed with finding a starting point, he is stopped dead, the victim of an internal emotional critic whose ire is now directed not just as his work but also his very self. No wonder the poor guy is on his way to solipsistic madness.
Out of this, in a weirdly logical id-appendectomy, Kaufman the screenwriter (who previously collaborated with director Spike Jonze on Being John Malkovich) invents for the movie his evil twin brother Donald (also Nicholas Cage) as his antithesis: vapid, gauche, talentless, derivative, oblivious, gregarious, and cheerful … and, infuriatingly, productive, sexually active (Maggie Gyllenhaal of Secretary in what is little more than a cameo), and worst of all, successful at selling his screenplay!
As Charlie sinks ever further into recursive despair, rejecting any overture or initiative, he spirals backwards in time to when New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep) first encounters the Orchid Thief of her book's title, toothless autodidactic swamp entrepreneur John Laroche (Chris Cooper of Matewan and American Beauty, in a tour de force performance that, were there any justice, would win an Oscar), and then forward through a comic potpourri of events, facts, speculations, and self-referential movie in-jokes, including a hilarious boot-camp-for-screenwriters seminar run by the stentorian hack himself, Robert McKee (the kaleidoscopic Brian Cox of L.I.E., another bravura reptilian performance), including a bellowed series of Do's and Don'ts all of which our movie has violated or will violate.
Recursive stories can be puzzles (Memento), or bittersweet (The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Slaughterhouse-Five), or deliberately infinite (The Magus, or E. R. Eddison's unique Victorian high fantasy novel The Worm Ouroboros). Alas, for all its winking grandiloquence, Adaptation fails its own tests, opting for a cliché-ridden car chase-cum-shock-effect wrapup that, unlike Malkovich's, is manipulative, clumsy, and dull.
"You are what you love, not what loves you," says someone to Charlie in a moment of absolution. It's a nice moment, never followed up. I liked this movie almost all the way through, but it left a bitter aftertaste of feeling manipulated, toyed with, and not taken seriously.