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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The movie's Charlie Kaufman is frumpy, balding and awkward, with a propensity for beating off, though when it comes to the movies he writes, he sure is principled. Yet he's not challenging the audience to understand him, but to pat itself on the back for grasping how he can't possibly harness his talents in the service of that harsh, tarted-up mistress we call Hollywood. We commend him for not being a whore, for refusing to play the game.
Although the movie's Charlie Kaufman isn't the real Charlie Kaufman, he's obviously being used as a mouthpiece for something the real Kaufman struggles with. But for all his self-involved hand-wringing, has the real Kaufman actually told a story that we care about, one that serves its characters above all? Or has he told one that is simply designed to flatter us? The refusal of Kaufman (the real one or the meta one) to bow to stupid Hollywood standards is both a kind of withdrawal and an avowal of superiority. The unspoken message seems to be: "Leave it to hacks like David Lean and John Huston to actually do the work of bringing books to the screen." Jonze and Kaufman are too good for it, and "Adaptation" is their assertion that the most interesting movie they could possibly make is one that's all about them.
Plenty of people have written passionately about the impossibility of bringing books to the screen, because it is, pure and simple, an impossibility. If we set out to judge an adaptation by how closely it approximates the visions that an author has already coaxed to life in our own imaginations, we're bound to be disappointed: Filmmakers aren't, and shouldn't have to be, mind-readers.
So it's easier, and more useful, to talk about the ways in which a movie adaptation is spiritually faithful to its source material. As the critic Robin Wood has said, himself apologizing for stating such a simple truth, "Literature is literature. Film is film." He goes on to say that there is no such thing as a faithful adaptation, since "the greatness of [great literature] resides in the writer's grasp of the potentialities of language" -- subtleties that can't be reproduced in film.
But Wood doesn't elevate literature above film, or vice versa. "The notion of the faithful adaptation is equally insulting to film," he writes. "It implies that film is the inferior art, and should be content (or even proud) to reproduce precisely what it can never hope to reproduce: the movement of the author's words on paper. The filmmaker has every right to take what s/he wants from a novel (be it Mickey Spillane or Tolstoy), and make of it whatever suits her or his interests."
"Adaptation" exercises those rights to the breaking point. Kaufman has decided he's the most interesting thing about Orlean's book, and he proceeds accordingly. While the movie's Charlie Kaufman pretends to be enthralled by Orlean's story, and even compassionately curious about her as a person, her story ends up melting away by the end of the movie, subsumed by his own neuroses.
The character of Orlean (as opposed to the real person Orlean), played by Meryl Streep, is a journalist who suddenly realizes she doesn't feel passionately about anything; she has written a book, "The Orchid Thief," about John LaRoche (Chris Cooper), a rare-orchid enthusiast in Florida who has gotten himself in trouble with the law for poaching rare specimens from the local swampland. But he loves these flowers; his intent is to protect them more than to profit from them. Kaufman doesn't know what to make of LaRoche's story as it has been told in Orlean's book. He's further frustrated by the fact that his layabout twin brother, Donald, has just sold a flashy screenplay that revels in all the elements (sex, car chases) Charlie has refused to use himself.
Donald is Charlie's invention, of course, a way for him to acknowledge that he does have baser instincts without having to take responsibility for them. By the movie's end, Charlie has become Donald as well, a kind of superscreenwriter for the new millennium -- principled, but with a knack for what will sell. He's going to do just fine for himself.
But what about us? "Adaptation" doesn't offer us a real story, just a bloated thesis. The movie doesn't reach out to anything or anyone; it's most interested in its own pinched vision. The movie's Band-Aid subtheme -- the thing that gives its title a double meaning -- is that human beings must adapt in order to grow. Life changes us a bit day by day, and we need to recognize those changes and act accordingly.
What a lofty and resonant idea! It may also be one of the greatest ass-saving constructs in the history of movies -- a faux-grand concept that dazzles people enough to keep them from catching on to how completely self-indulgent "Adaptation" is.
