Throughout my four years of being on my High School Speech team: there was one unwritten rule that seemed to be the most concrete (when it comes to written speeches): Never write a speech about speech team.
True, one should write what one knows, but there were so many speeches about speech team (especially in the Original Comedy event, which I was mainly in) that it was a cliche even before I entered High School. What I never mentioned was how the idea came from having just seen the Spike Jonze film Adaptation.
Even though it is Jonze at the helm, it is the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman I would always come to associate with the film, and not just because the main protagonist is a fictionalized version of him (portrayed by Nicholas Cage). The film takes place just during the end of post production of Kaufman’s latest film, Being John Malkovich (which I would eventually see years later). He is in the process of trying to adapt The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), but has hit a bad case of writer’s block (“Maybe banana nut. That’s a good muffin”).
Even worse, his rather lackadaisical (and fictional) twin brother Donald (also Cage) is trying his first stab at screenwriting, and seems to have a knack for it. Not to mention that Donald’s love life is doing much better than Charlie’s, as he has started dating a make up girl (Maggie Gyllenhaal, in one of her first breakout roles.)
The film also jumps back and forth between Orlean and Charlie (who is now fantasizing about her), as we see her process of writing the Orchid Thief that ends up having her fascinated with its subject, John Laroche (Chris Cooper, who won the film its only Oscar for Best Supporting Actor).
I was 15 when I saw this, and I remember distinctively driving home with my dad (who had seen it already prior). He brought up more ideas about the movie which was something new to me: Until that time, I did not know films could have this many ideas. Yes, the concept of Dawin’s Adaptation is mentioned, but the title of the film has more to it than just that or even the process of adapting a book.
Consider, for example, how Charlie ends up going to a writer’s workshop taught by Robert McKee (Brian Cox). After a brutal verbal take down, Kaufman confronts McKee, and the latter offers him a secret to how to finish the script. This is directly taken from what McKee (and myself, among others) consider to be the best script ever written, Casablanca (which also had twin screen writers, Philip and Julius Epstein, along with Howard Koch. It also has four syllables in the title.) Note how the film then begins to change tones, as he approaches Donald (who is writing a script for a fictional film called The 3, which is all action/violence/sex and not at all to Charlie’s liking) for help to finish the Orchid script. He himself is adapting to the times.
While the film did not win the Oscar for screenplay, it still gets me that it was nominated in the Adapted category (a technicality that would plague films like Barbie in the future). Yes, it is an adaptation, but the film paved the way for other films of true originality to follow such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in 2004 (which finally did win an Oscar for Kaufman) and 2013’s Her (which won a Screenplay Oscar for Spike Jonze).
Then there is the acting in the film. Streep has been around for decades, yet somehow 2002 was the year I finally discovered her brilliance (she was also in The Hours that same year). I was always a fan of Chris Cooper ever since seeing him in October Sky, so seeing him hear getting to play a charming toothless semi-weirdo was a joy in and of it self. Finally, there is Nicholas Cage. There is no actor I can think of who gets more flack for the bad movies he is in, which is a real shame because that makes people forget the ones he is effective in are really good (I’ve still yet to see Leaving Las Vegas for which he won an Oscar for).
Adaptation was one of the first of many films to prove any actor, no matter how much the public lampoons them, can be at their best when given the right script.
(As of this writing, Adaptation is available on Kanopy, Paramount Plus, and VOD.)
Nothing else to say 