Making Roland an American intensifies the dynamic between him and the passionate but restrained British professor played by Gwyneth Paltrow. As Byatt wrote Roland, he was passive to the point of being recessive. (Byatt herself told LaBute that, as she'd written him, Roland wouldn't work as a movie character; he'd be too much of a drip.) Roland, as LaBute has reimagined him, still has some of those low-key characteristics -- he is a relatively quiet, polite American, after all, and like Roland, he's a genuinely passionate academic.

But we know that, deep down at least, he has an American's innate brashness (brash as far as the English are concerned, that is). His staunchly American qualities give Paltrow's character, who is sometimes a bit scary in her resoluteness, more to stand up to; they heighten the challenge. She and Roland are foreign to one another in more ways than one, but they connect across that chasm.

Even though movies are never a replacement for the written word, there are times when a film version of a book is sharper than the book itself. Nick Hornby's "About a Boy" was highly entertaining, but it also seemed a bit shambling and aimless. The screenplay adaptation (by Paul and Chris Weitz and Peter Hedges) gave the story more drive and momentum. There are cases, too, when an adaptation is a different creature altogether. Erin Cressida Wilson's screenplay for "Secretary" took a very short and very pointed story by Mary Gaitskill, about a young woman who discovers she has a predilection for being spanked, and elongated it in some places and rounded it out in others. "Secretary" the movie is a sexual fairytale about love between misfits; Gaitskill's story is darker and less expansive, but startlingly direct. Director Steven Shainberg took some liberties with the tone of the story, but he understood Gaitskill's essential notion that there are certain kinds of understanding between people that can't be spelled out or neatly corralled.

It's doubtful that the process of turning a movie into a book is ever easy: If you mapped the screenwriter's psychic trail from beginning to end, it would most likely be a bloody one, dotted with huge crimson splotches where seemingly essential scenes or wonderful exchanges that just didn't fit had to be excised ruthlessly. And then there are the ghosts of the books that were adapted badly: Think of Arthur Schnitzler's "Dreamnovel" howling across the plains, misunderstood and forlorn, having been botched by Stanley Kubrick in "Eyes Wide Shut."

So where does that leave Susan Orlean's "Adaptation" -- a book that obviously means something to Orlean and to the many people who read and enjoyed it? In interviews Orlean has claimed to be happy with the movie. And the reality is, she sold the book and accepted that it was out of her hands. But I still wonder what, in her heart of hearts, she thinks of what Kaufman has done with her book. I didn't write "The Orchid Thief" -- heck, I didn't even read the whole thing -- and even I feel somewhat protective of it. What does it mean when a book's essence becomes subsumed by a screenwriter who thinks his insecurities are more interesting than anything another writer has come up with?

And what should we make of a screenwriter who thinks so much about the process of making something that he only drains himself of the energy to actually make it? Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt" -- itself an adaptation of an Alberto Moravia novel -- begins with a credit sequence in which, in voiceover, Godard introduces his actors, his cinematographer, his screenwriter and, last and most humbly, himself. Occurring even before the movie has begun, it's one of the movie's most touching moments -- touching because it reminds us that a human being made this movie. It's a careful arrangement of choices, a nonmathematical formula of thought and feeling that he hopes against hope will add up to something.

On the face of it, it may seem as if Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze are doing something in "Adaptation" that's similar to that credit sequence -- breaking down that barrier between the people who've made a movie and the people who sit in the audience watching it. But they're essentially throwing up a different kind of barrier between filmmakers and audiences. They're using their smug gimmickry to distance us from our deepest emotions rather than lead us straight into battle with them. Kaufman the beleaguered screenwriter is the star of the show, and its hero. He wants every civilian out there to know that writing, like war, is hell. He should tell it to the Marines. Or maybe he should just tell it to Susan Orlean.

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