By William Wolf

ADAPTATION  Send This Review to a Friend

The most original film of 2002, "Adaptation" is an elaborate journey into imagination filtered through the sensibilities of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze. It is about adapting a literary work for the screen, writer's block, seeking solutions, compromise and coming up with a finished work. It's about the very filmmaking process itself, and if all that were not enough, "Adaptation" also features a smashing double performance by Nicolas Cage as Kaufman and a twin brother that the screenplay provides. And if that were still not enough, there is Meryl Streep in an amusing, romantic role as the author whose work is being adapted and who is swept into the orbit of Kaufman's film-within-a-film creativity.

Got it? One of the places we meet Cage as Charlie is on the set where Jonze is filming his previous "Being John Malkovich," which Charlie wrote. He appears rather superfluous in the filmmaking process, which is in keeping with Charlie's personality of anxiety-ridden self-doubt. He's the ideal candidate for writer's block. This time around he is faced with the challenge of adapting New Yorker writer Susan Orlean's "The Orchid Thief," a book about a real life Florida orchid enthusiast John Laroche, a colorful individualist with an obsession for discovering rarely found orchids. Chris Cooper's compelling portrayal of him is another of the film's strong points.

Cage, playing Donald, the twin brother supplied to Charlie, is the exact opposite of Charlie. In contrast to Charlie's uptightness, Donald is happy-go-lucky and knows no fear about trying to write a screenplay or coming on to a woman. No artsy stuff from him. He wants the right formula to produce a lucrative hit, and he has no qualms about signing up for a famous class on screenwriting to learn how to do it. As you might predict, while Charlie is in the doldrums Donald gets a prompt deal.

Charlie's solution, accepting advice to ad zip to his adaptation of a subject as overtly uneventful as searching for orchids, sends the film into a wild spin of compromise, but it also gives the film we are watching a new life built around Charlie, who has injected himself into the drama involving Streep as Orlean and Cooper as Laroche. The trouble is that the extravagant, melodramatic resolution isn't very believable for us, the audience, and yet it is exactly right for the film's amusingly cynical look at how to make a movie in the context of what's demanded these days.

"Adaptation" functions on all these levels, with further boosts from the supporting cast, including Tilda Swinton and Maggie Gyllenhaal. But the acting crown in this inventive romp goes hands down to Cage, who gives not one of his best ever performances but two of them. A Columbia Pictures release.

  

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