![]() ![]() Jonze manages to place them seamlessly together in the frame. Cage plays two fractious, unsettled characters, who each become more complicated as the picture vaults and scrambles toward its conclusion, or that Mr. Jonze share a casual, daredevil sensibility, and the two of them - or should I say the three of them? - pull off one of the most amazing technical stunts in recent film history. And so is the second credited screenwriter of ''Adaptation,'' Charlie Kaufman's twin brother, Donald. Malkovich, in a cameo, reappears playing himself (a role for which he won the best supporting actor award from the New York Film Critics Circle), Mr. ''Adaptation'' picks up, literally, where ''Malkovich'' left off: on the set of the earlier picture, where Charlie Kaufman skulks around in a neurotic funk. Its characters were drawn together by an itchy desire to shed their own skins, a longing made hilariously literal by their discovery of a secret passageway into Mr. Like ''Adaptation,'' it was a movie about creative insecurity, misbegotten love and the traps of identity. Kaufman and Spike Jonze, the director of ''Adaptation,'' concocted a deft and dizzy trompe l'oeil brain teaser that, for all its kinetic inventiveness, had a surprising sweetness and intensity of feeling. In their first collaboration, ''Being John Malkovich,'' Mr. Orlean's dense, elusive, intellectual mystery story are interwoven with a retelling of that story, until finally the two plots collide, overlap and blow each other to smithereens (along with the viewer's mind). Kaufman's flailing attempts to honor the nuances and implications of Ms. Many of these elements, by the way, are faithfully reconstructed in the movie. Orlean frame the book's excursions into Darwinian theory, Florida ecology and the history of orchid collecting. Another is that obsessive manias - for instance, the passion for certain forms of plant life that afflicts some of the characters - reproduce themselves like madly pollinating wildflowers.Īccording to the credits, someone named Charlie Kaufman did indeed write - or at least helped to write - the screenplay for ''Adaptation,'' which indeed is billed as based on ''The Orchid Thief,'' the true story of a renegade horticulturalist, John Laroche. After all, one of the movie's reigning conceits is that the boundary between reality and representations of it - between life and art, if you want - is highly porous, maybe even altogether imaginary. ![]() I realize that the fear of contracting writer's block from a fictional character is crazy, but in the brilliantly scrambled, self-consuming world of ''Adaptation,'' which opens today nationwide, it has a certain plausibility. As the deadline for this review approached, I pictured myself in his agitated state, pacing the floor in a sweat, muttering nonsense into a hand-held tape recorder and then desperately stalling my impatient editors: ''It's coming along. But my sleeplessness was edged with panic it seemed to mirror the frantic anxiety that the hero of ''Adaptation,'' a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman, suffers as he struggles to complete a script based on ''The Orchid Thief'' by Susan Orlean, a writer for The New Yorker.Īt the paranoid hour of 3 in the morning, I wondered if Kaufman's towering writer's block might be contagious. Since quite a few of the films I see have a decidedly soporific effect, those bouts of insomnia might in themselves be sufficient grounds for recommending this one. More than once in the week after I saw ''Adaptation,'' I found myself suddenly awake in the middle of the night, pulse racing, fretting over the movie's intricate, fascinating themes. ![]()
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