"Adaptation" and the perils of adaptation
While Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze made their massively self-indulgent metamovie, other filmmakers have been doing the hard work of shaping books into films.
By Stephanie Zacharek
Dec. 16, 2002 | In Spike Jonze's film "Adaptation," screenwriter Charlie Kaufman writes himself -- or, rather, a version of himself -- into his own screenplay. The movie's Charlie Kaufman, like the real Charlie Kaufman, has been trying to write a movie treatment of Susan Orlean's book, "The Orchid Thief," and has found himself stymied at every turn. He deems the book unadaptable, too oblique to be shaped into a motion picture. So the movie's Charlie Kaufman writes himself into the drama of Orlean's story as a way of ruminating on the sorry lot of writers and their flailing, pathetic, ostensibly moving attempts to capture anything real and true.
Brilliant! Original! Genre-busting! "Adaptation" is a movie whose blurbology is written into its DNA, even as it proves to us, over and over again, how winkingly aware it is that every aspect of the movie business, from the ministrations of ass-kissing development execs to the false approbation of critics' blurbs, is meaningless. But there's one very meaningful blurb that could be applied to "Adaptation," one that wouldn't help sell it to audiences (wouldn't want that, would we, Messrs. Kaufman and Jonze?) but that would chop straight to the core of what "Adaptation" is, and what it's proud of being.
Cowardly!
But you won't see that in any newspaper ad.
"Adaptation," with its gee-whillikers approach to the bloody hard work of making art, may pretend to be unassuming, but it's fully cognizant of the power it dangles over its audience. Self-referential to the extreme, it's the most meta of meta-movies. You might call it meta-macho. If you're not meta enough to see how meta "Adaptation" is, then you clearly haven't spent enough time, as Kaufman and Jonze have, examining the unexaminable. (You're probably the type of person who still uses the word "postmodern.")
And if you're so meta that you're completely unimpressed with how meta it is, then you're only reinforcing the movie's point: You've become so meta-consumed by metaculture that you're no longer able to take pleasure in art, to laugh at your own foibles, to appreciate true brilliance (that is, the brilliance of Kaufman and Jones). Meanwhile, "Adaptation" is a movie that eats itself whole and leaves the audience with nothing, and we're supposed to go home happily, clutching our little souvenir naughts as if they actually added up to something.
But just for kicks, let's do something adamantly un-meta and put "Adaptation" in context -- specifically, in the context of the unusually large number of fine, or at least interesting, movies that have been adapted from books, short stories or plays this year. That list includes (but isn't limited to) the Weitz brothers' "About a Boy," Neil LaBute's "Possession," Lynne Ramsay's "Morvern Callar," Steven Shainberg's "Secretary," Phillip Noyce's "The Quiet American," Clare Peploe's "Triumph of Love," Michael Apted's "Enigma," Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" and Steven Soderbergh's "Solaris."
There's also a secondary list of movie adaptations that don't work -- "Nicholas Nickleby" and "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets," for example -- but that at the very least show an awareness on the filmmaker's part of what it means to turn words into movies. In a year when so many filmmakers struggled, successfully or otherwise, with what it means to translate a book to film, Kaufman and Jonze took the easy way out, choosing instead to make a cheap in-joke that pretends in only the most cursory way to wrestle with the notion of what it means to infuse a movie with beauty and meaning.
"Adaptation" wheedles the audience into its confidence, urging us to congratulate ourselves for being hip enough to get the message. The movie's Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) wrings his hands over the kind of movie he doesn't want to write: One with a character arc, with car chases, with gratuitous or, it seems, any other kind of sex. (There's sex in "Adaptation," but it's not particularly sexy -- in this movie as well as their first, "Being John Malkovich," Jonze and Kaufman don't bother with sex much at all. They're like frat boys who just want to get it over with.)
