Movie adaptations

I mentioned not too long ago that I had several more recent movies that aired on TCM during 31 Days of Oscar that I was going to have to get to before they expire from my DVR. One of them from the early 2000s is Adaptation.

Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) is a real-life screenwriter, and writer of the screenplay for Adaptation. Before that, he worked with director Spike Jonze (director of Adaptation) on Being John Malkovich on the movie Being John Malkovich. As Adaptation opens, Charlie is trying to come up with an adaptation of a book called The Orchid Thief, by an author named Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep).

Now here we need to stop and go back a bit. Susan Orlean is also a real person, like Kaufman, a Manhattan writer who came across an interesting story about a man who went into the Florida swamps to try to poach a species of orchid that's considered very rare. So she decided to write a long-form article about the case for The New Yorker, and eventually turned that into the book The Orchid Thief. I haven't read the book, but by all accounts the story is about subject material that might make for an interesting movie. Except that the way Orlean wrote The Orchid Thief apparently made it hard to adapt the book directly into a movie.

So part of Adaptation is about the fact that Kaufman is developing a case of writer's block trying to turn The Orchid Thief into a workable screenplay. Except that the movie isn't a documentary by any means. For one thing, the real-life Kaufman invents a twin brother, Donald Kaufman (obivously played by Nicolas Cage as well), who is an aspiring but unsuccessful screenwriter. Donald goes to seminars run by famed screenwriting professor Robert McKee (Brian Cox). Donald comes up with ideas that are ridiculous largely because they're the stereotype of a bunch of tropes put together to come up with something that might be a story.

Getting back to Charlie and Susan, The Orchid Thief is also based on a real person, John Laroche (played by Chris Cooper, who won a Supporting Actor Oscar). Today we'd call the guy Florida Man, although I don't know that the term existed 25 years ago. He's a "hold my beer" type who has developed a series of all-consuming passions, only to drop one to pick up the next, with orchids being the current passion. Susan, however, begins to figure out that she really doesn't have any passions in her life, so she gets fascinated by John, in part because of the New York class bigotry and in part because he can have passions where she doesn't seem to be able to.

Charlie continues to try to write that screenplay, while Hollywood producer types are increasingly getting on him to finish the damn thing so that they can start filming it. Eventually, his plot part about trying to write that screenplay comes together with the plot of Susan writing the book while getting to know Laroche. The movie goes in ways that real life didn't, although I won't reveal those.

Adaptation is an interesting movie that veers off in all sorts of unexpected directions. Some people might have a bit of a problem with that considering that at the heart of all this is a book that's actually based on real people. I didn't know anything about the book or the movie before going in to it, so I didn't have any of those problems. Instead, I was able to sit back and enjoy what is a bit of a wild ride, and a lot of fun. If you want something different, Adaptation certainly fits the bill.