ADAPTATION Dir: Spike Jonze. Starring: Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper. Adaptation is the latest postmodern flambé from Charlie Kauffman’s head. Certainly, it’s a more grounded and consistent work that the wildly overrated Being John Malcovich, but again; I can’t help feeling that somewhere along this wacky ride, he’s missed the point. Nicolas Cage plays Kauffman. Overweight, bald, sweating and neurotic, he’s been hired to adapt Susan Orlean’s book, The Orchid Thief, into a screenplay. Unfortunately, its ethereal, meandering passages are threatening to get the better of him. Sharing his house is Donald (also Cage), his successful twin brother, who is writing a screenplay about a serial killer. All this is interspersed with the adaptation itself. Meryl Streep is Orleans, investigating the eccentric, passionate world of orchid-keeping, and the crazy Guy Larouche, a zany southerner and the aforementioned thief. Now, there’s a whole lot of thematic gold here: the nature of passion, the process of adaptation, a writer’s attempt to recreate something beautiful, and the idea of vicarious catharsis. Alas, you only get the most fleeting glimpse. Most of the time, you’re left wading through a morass of quotation marks. Is this real life? Is this what happened? Does Charlie really act like that? It’s impossible to ignore these questions for most of the two hour running length, and Kauffman wants to have it both ways; button pushing and dime-store irony on one hand, cheap emotional pay-offs on the other. It’s profoundly irritating, and clashes loudly with the undetectable performances of Cage, Streep and Spike Jonze himself behind the camera.
	It’s a real shame, too, because as Kauffman, Nicolas Cage brings a humanity and pathos to what – like all of Kauffman’s characters – is essentially a cut-out cliché. There’s desperation and a sweet kind of tenderness to his performance – it’s absent from the screenplay, and I liked it a lot. But Kauffman can’t respect his characters, even when they’re himself, and a Hollywood ending gives us everything he despises earlier in the film. Somehow, we’re meant to be satisfied with this, but he should have learnt from Being John Malcovich: no puppet master is that good. C+, a B- if you loved Being yada yada. Patrick Garson. Talk about Adaptation on our forum now.
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