“I’m fat, I’m bald, I’m repulsive, I’m old,” seems like the opening line of a Harvey Weinstein biopic as he repents for his sins in an untimely act of self-loathing and reflection while waiting at the gates of Hell (even the devil won’t let him in). Or was it a line from Ernest Stavro Blofeld in Thunderball, confiding in his therapist with cat-in-hand before James Bond rudely interrupted him? No, it was actually Charlie Kaufman in his 2002 screenplay for Adaptation, his film about himself and his imaginary brother adapting the book The Orchid Thief after the success of Kaufman’s previous film Being John Malkovich.
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Later this year, Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s showpiece is set to turn 20. Two decades on from its release, the film that had critics raving has aged like a 2002 bottle of Pinot Noir — as palatable, if not more so, in 2022 as it was in 2002, though the film will have to wait another year before legally raising a glass of it. The Jonze and Kaufman partnership was a tried and tested formula, a critical success story having begun four years prior with Being John Malkovich, and Adaptation was another movie that was bound for a critical love-in.
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Adaptation stars Nicolas Cage, a man as famous for his stellar career in the performing arts as he is for having his face adorned on various items of furniture that make for comfier seating. The comedy-drama concerns the story of Charlie Kaufman, a writer suffering from writer’s block who struggles to turn author Susan Orlean’s (played brilliantly by Meryl Streep) novel on an Orchid collector and thief, John Laroche (Chris Cooper) into a viable, digestible screenplay.
Charlie lives with his twin brother, Donald (also portrayed by Nicolas Cage), whose simple but cheerfully determined temperament sees him excel in screenwriting and his love life, much to Charlie’s utter disdain. With time running out to conclude the project, Charlie enlists the help of his twin, and together the pair resort to extreme measures in completing their joint script.
Charlie, Donald, and Cage’s Portrayal of Twins
The character ‘Charlie Kaufman’ is a profusely sweaty, fat, balding, self-hating screenwriter, whose scathing self-criticism is actually a pretty accurate assessment of his current state, and he doubles up as the movie’s primary protagonist and antagonist. He finds solutions to his problems and then problems to his solutions, perpetually trapped in this never-ending merry-go-round of internal conflict. Cage is exquisite at playing a semi-celebrated but now down-on-his-luck screenwriter who, in the midst of an existential crisis, must attempt to transfer the un-transferable, putting someone’s written work into cinematic comprehension.
Except he can’t, as he’s plagued by writer’s block and by the novel’s stark lack of compatibility for a movie adaptation. It takes a great deal of mastery to truly navigate a role with finesse, but to play two characters in the same film with such brilliance is an astonishing accomplishment in acting terms. Cage overcomes perhaps the most difficult obstacle posed to any actor that dares play a set of twins, which is physically appearing as the same person, while simultaneously conveying sufficiently disparate mannerisms, personality, and tone of voice so that the audience can distinguish who is who.
Charlie and Donald really come across as two separate entities. Charlie is a downtrodden, self-loathing intellectual, a man with proven talent in his line of work but whose painful social awkwardness is hampering his ability to piece together a script. On the other hand, Donald is a cheerfully confident optimist; fully aware of his twin’s intellectual superiority, he charmingly panders to Charlie’s better judgment and continually seeks out his twin’s approval. The line between Cage’s Charlie and Cage’s Donald is never blurred or confused.
An Amalgamation of Genre Conventions and Narrative Strands
Adaptation is part biopic, part fiction, part documentary, part drama, part comedy, and all meta: it fuses together multiple aspects from various genre conventions to create what arguably should be an incoherent mess, but is really a phenomenally well-executed piece of filmmaking. It’s a movie that successfully incorporates three narrative strands in ostensibly alternate realities, that eventually merge at their final destination to fashion this really perplexing finale.
Essentially, it’s a movie written by Charlie Kaufman about Charlie Kaufman writing about Charlie Kaufman. The actual, real, non-fictional Kaufman was tasked with producing the actual, real, non-fictional Susan Orlean novel The Orchid Thief, which is about the actual, real, non-fictional life of orchid collector John Laroche. It documents Kaufman’s struggle with trying to adapt the book into a movie, so out of audacious creativity (and semi-self-indulgence), he decides to write about his own struggles writing the film, which has his writer’s block, Susan and John’s relationship, his fictional brother, Donald, as well as a poignant meditation on change, authenticity, solipsism, and art.
Adaptation is this weird and wonderful entanglement of storylines, one that weaves itself together to form a convoluted knot before it unravels to reveal how the film was made. It’s as if an instruction manual explained how the instruction manual we are reading was made. Confusing? Yes. But even after 20 years, Adaptation is a brilliantly original screenplay, and a film that never loses the thread of what it is trying to achieve.
