I don’t know when I enjoy movies more: when I see in them what I am, or when I see in them a vision of something I want to be, however ephemeral. Like most people, I enjoy losing myself in the common cinematic fantasy where I become the lead character, be that character good or evil, male or female, comforting or terrifying. But some of the best movies reach into my own psyche and make me uncomfortable with observations and elaborations that seem to speak directly to me alone, revealing reality in a manner ultimately more satisfying than the more ephemeral pleasure of fantasy that accompany lesser entertainments.

Adaptation is this kind of movie.

Charlie Kaufman, paired with his imaginary twin brother and alter-ego Donald has brilliantly captured the constant interior monologue of a working artist, in all its inconsistent glory, rocking back and forth between banality and trenchant insight, with bouts of masturbation (literally and mentally) sandwiched in between. One moment Charlie finds himself fixated on his need for coffee and a muffin (banana nut), the next he is ranting incoherently into a tape recorder at the very moment of what surely feels like inspiration, though at times we in the detached and faceless audience are quite sure it is something else altogether. The solipsism of watching Kaufman watching himself author the script of the very movie we are seeing is the physical embodiment of the inward navel-spying gaze of creation itself. Nicolas Cage brings to life the twin (physically and psychologically) aspects of creation with aplomb, invoking a fiction that is, as Homer Simpson would say, “Funny because it’s true.”

The film archly reflects the inner world of Kaufman as he writes the screenplay for the very film you are watching. It’s at once disturbing, funny, messy, and ultimately fantastic. Cage perfectly overplays both Kaufman and his fictional, Bill McKee worshipping (and decidedly unblocked) twin. Charlie is an introverted, agitated, over-intellectualizing author, while Donald is
oblivious, quick with a joke, and confident. While Charlie agonizes over the complex needs to bring a “book about flowers” to life, Donald blithely churns out his script that has a single schizophrenic character serving as serial killer, victim, and pursuing sheriff, the impossibility of the physical mechanism for implementing this be damned. In truth the real life book Charlie is tasked with adapting (The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean) is much more than a book about flowers… it is really the story of an obsessive, apparent rube with enough backstory for three movies. As Charlie’s desire to massage this “clever New Yorker shit” into a story with a more traditional narrative arc unravels, so does the movie. To everyone’s benefit.

For a short stretch near the end Adapation teeters on the edge of becoming the massive cop-out that some observers have claimed it to be. Nearly hoisted by his own petard, Kaufman has to find a way to write himself out of the corner he has squarely placed the fim. We are left to wonder what trick can possibly be pulled from Kaufman’s hat to save his movie– a trick that is necessary if the film is to avoid the slow “death” by trailing off in an orgy of pseudo-intellectualism and wishful irony” that seems to be the bane of the kind of independent filmmaking which informs the creative landscape of this movie. At the same time, Kaufman can’t resort to a “Hollywood ending” of the very kind he most despises. That Kaufman is actually able to take the best intentions of both of these methods and make them work– simultaneously realizing the inevitable, permanent schism that must emerge between the twins– is a precise illustration of who wears the real Genius Pants in the Kaufman family. Not to mention that his elaboration of both filmmaking conventions allows him to both use them for his own purposes and comment on their shortcomings, essnetially folding the movie in on itself in the manner of Ourobouros, the mythical symbol of the snake swallowing its own tail, which makes an appearance in the film as part of a debate between the twins.

It’s difficult to synopsize a film of this kind, adding as it does another layer to an already complex structure. Suffice it to say that Chris Cooper and Meryl Streep turn in Oscar-worthy performances as the orchid thief and Susan Orlean, respectively, while Tilda Swynton brightens the screen as Charlie Kaufman’s (unrecognized) real muse.

Ultimately, Adaptation serves two ends, simultaneously illuminating an inner creative landscape that I inhabit (and that inhabits me), while catering to a usually repressed dream of what I hope I can someday become. Like Chuang Tzu, who wakes wondering if he is a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming he is man, so I left this movie in a fugue state between depression and exhilaration, mockery and despair, triumph and a slow realization of the will to succeed and possibly transform myself.