Clever. This movie is clever, sometimes stepping over into precious. But if being overly precious is not high on your list of movie flaws (there are so many others), this movie may appeal to you, as it did to me. If you're into semiotics, deconstruction, frame analysis or that kind of thing, there are some nice little jokes you'll enjoy.
For anyone who has ever seriously pursued a creative vocation, especially writing, this movie will appeal. If you are the kind of person who has gone to expensive seminars, hoping (along with hundreds of others) to transform your craft or your life, this movie will make you laugh.
It is about a screenwriter who is trying to write something original, in a day and age when everything has been done so many times, even originality seems to have become clichéd. He has a further problem, which is that he can't get out of his own head. And he is neurotic. He is hired by a major motion picture studio to do something almost impossible: write an adaptation of a non-fiction book about orchids so that it can be a regular Hollywood film. It sounds like a stupid thing for a studio to hire a writer to do, but of course, that's exactly what the Studio did with this film. Adaptation is based on the work of New Yorker writer, Susan Orlean. She is played by Meryl Streep in the movie. The real life Susan Orlean had her scenes cut out of the movie (she also wrote the magazine article, `Surf Girls of Maui,' on which the film, Blue Crush was based).
While Charlie Kaufman (the screenwriter for Being John Malkovich) struggles with the increasingly impossible task of finishing a script about weirdos and orchids, his brother, Donald, decides to take up screenwriting. Donald isn't writing an adaptation, he's writing an original screenplay. Charlie thinks he knows everything about writing, Donald goes to a screenwriting seminar and posts the teacher's `Ten Commandments of Screenwriting' above his laptop. Charlie pecks away on some old manual typewriter. We've seen it all before: sibling rivalry, identical twins who are opposites, so on and so forth. We think we know the ending, as long as Charlie is writing it. Somehow, despite Charlie's quest for originality, nothing very original transpires. Some folks, at this point in the movie, will understandably get bored to tears. Charlie just gets more neurotic and self-absorbed. In fact, the only thing he can write about is himself, so he writes himself into the orchid movie.
I guess things pick up at the end. Someone else has said the characters get `weird.' While I disliked myself as I fell for the Hollywood-style manipulation that the ending appeared to be, still, I woke up and was squirming in my seat. Charlie attends the writing seminar, and learns to do `research.' Thus liberated from the plotless constraints of the work he's supposed to be adapting, Charlie can write a different kind of movie. Research, apparently, can lead anywhere.
The thing is, I cared a lot about the various characters. I liked John and Donald best, Susan and Charlie were rather boring and neurotic. The contrast drove the movie. Do we all want to be interesting creatures of Hollywood then? Or are we just human beings, adapting to our own predictable life circumstances by preferring stories with oomph and characters with style? Chris Cooper's performance as John LaRoche was something I'd never seen before on the screen. That's always a reason to make a movie. The character and the performance were original, the actors were in first place all along. The screenplay ultimately served the studio, the actors, the cinematographer, the director and even the prop department extraordinarily well but, perhaps, screenwriters don't come out looking so heroic.
For anyone who has ever seriously pursued a creative vocation, especially writing, this movie will appeal. If you are the kind of person who has gone to expensive seminars, hoping (along with hundreds of others) to transform your craft or your life, this movie will make you laugh.
It is about a screenwriter who is trying to write something original, in a day and age when everything has been done so many times, even originality seems to have become clichéd. He has a further problem, which is that he can't get out of his own head. And he is neurotic. He is hired by a major motion picture studio to do something almost impossible: write an adaptation of a non-fiction book about orchids so that it can be a regular Hollywood film. It sounds like a stupid thing for a studio to hire a writer to do, but of course, that's exactly what the Studio did with this film. Adaptation is based on the work of New Yorker writer, Susan Orlean. She is played by Meryl Streep in the movie. The real life Susan Orlean had her scenes cut out of the movie (she also wrote the magazine article, `Surf Girls of Maui,' on which the film, Blue Crush was based).
While Charlie Kaufman (the screenwriter for Being John Malkovich) struggles with the increasingly impossible task of finishing a script about weirdos and orchids, his brother, Donald, decides to take up screenwriting. Donald isn't writing an adaptation, he's writing an original screenplay. Charlie thinks he knows everything about writing, Donald goes to a screenwriting seminar and posts the teacher's `Ten Commandments of Screenwriting' above his laptop. Charlie pecks away on some old manual typewriter. We've seen it all before: sibling rivalry, identical twins who are opposites, so on and so forth. We think we know the ending, as long as Charlie is writing it. Somehow, despite Charlie's quest for originality, nothing very original transpires. Some folks, at this point in the movie, will understandably get bored to tears. Charlie just gets more neurotic and self-absorbed. In fact, the only thing he can write about is himself, so he writes himself into the orchid movie.
I guess things pick up at the end. Someone else has said the characters get `weird.' While I disliked myself as I fell for the Hollywood-style manipulation that the ending appeared to be, still, I woke up and was squirming in my seat. Charlie attends the writing seminar, and learns to do `research.' Thus liberated from the plotless constraints of the work he's supposed to be adapting, Charlie can write a different kind of movie. Research, apparently, can lead anywhere.
The thing is, I cared a lot about the various characters. I liked John and Donald best, Susan and Charlie were rather boring and neurotic. The contrast drove the movie. Do we all want to be interesting creatures of Hollywood then? Or are we just human beings, adapting to our own predictable life circumstances by preferring stories with oomph and characters with style? Chris Cooper's performance as John LaRoche was something I'd never seen before on the screen. That's always a reason to make a movie. The character and the performance were original, the actors were in first place all along. The screenplay ultimately served the studio, the actors, the cinematographer, the director and even the prop department extraordinarily well but, perhaps, screenwriters don't come out looking so heroic.