| Home | Movies A-M | Movies N-Z | News |
Poster (c) Columbia/Tristar
Watch out! Adaptation. is the weirdest movie since…I don’t know, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Human Nature, or Being John Malkovich? All four of these have been written by Charlie Kaufman, and Adaptation. is his weirdest yet.. It’s not to say it’s his best (that honor goes to Confessions), nor funniest, but it still racks up points on the weirdness scale.
Kaufman writes himself into a real life situation he had. He was chosen to adapt Susan Orlean’s nonfiction book The Orchid Thief, but could never seem to do it. So he wrote the screenplay to Adaptation., about his struggle. He’s an aging, bald, fat, dateless man who was given the job to adapt Orlean’s book. He has trouble, while his brother Donald is starting to make it in the business with a stupid horror cliché The Three. And then it gets weird.
One burning question is on my mind: Why did Chris Cooper win Best Supporting Actor? All he had was a set of fake “teeth” and a part that didn’t even seem challenging. What Orlean (Meryl Streep) says about him, that he’s a very interesting character, I didn’t really see. His character didn’t interest me at all, and I wasn’t exactly in pain when he was in the screen, but I wasn’t exactly smiling.
Overall, this was a better movie that Being John Malkovich, but was nowhere near as funny (which is kind of pathetic, because I didn’t really think Malkovich was that funny). I think I laughed twice, which, for a comedy, isn’t that good, but since it has such a quirky style I can forgive it. Quirky movies have always had a special place in my heart, but this one was a little too weird, such as Kaufman dictating a screenplay, which actually turns out to be for the movie we’re watching.
Nicolas Cage, who played both Charlie and Donald, did better than, say, Gone in 60 Seconds, but definitely wasn’t Oscar-caliber. Streep and Cooper, ditto. I didn’t really find anything to suck me into the film, and the last third was just plain preposterous and unlikely. It really brought down the film a whole lot, from being marginally good to being semi-ok.
One other point against Adaptation. is that it was everything it tried to be. Kaufman stated that he didn’t want his adaptation of The Orchid Thief to be a Hollywood film; he didn’t want Orlean and John Laroche to fall in love, he didn’t want clichés or sex, and he wanted things to make sense. Kaufman was wrong, then.
Rated R for language, sexuality, some drug use and violent images.
Review Date: June 14, 2003