uHollywood

There are many great adaptations of books, but ‘Adaptation’ by Charlie Kaufman is one of the best, and certainly one of the quirkiest and most unusual.

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman was hired to adapt the book ‘The Orchid Thief’ by Susan Orlean. This is a beautiful book, and well worth reading, but the problem CharlieStates he found was that it’s basically a book about flowers, and he wants to do justice to the flowers.

Charlie’s despair at not being able to adapt an unadaptable novel leads him to write a screenplay about himself writing a screenplay that’s an adaptation of the unadaptable book called ‘The Orchid Thief’. The remarkable thing is that in doing so, Kaufman really does adapt the book to the screen, and the audience is privy to the thoughts of the writer as he writes the script for the film that they are watching.

Being Charlie Kaufman, writer of ‘Being John Malkovich’, naturally he doesn’t want to ‘do the Hollywood thing’ and have drugs, sex, vehicle chases and heroes growing and struggling and succeeding in the end, but he has so much trouble adapting the book that he asks his (fictional) brother Donald (writer of a new Hollywood motion picture about killers, vehicle chases, drugs and sex) to help him out. The story then enters a fast spiral of twists and turns in the swamps of Florida.

‘Adaptation’ is a brilliant, funny and witty script and has the same director (Spike Jonze) and production team as Kaufman’s earlier film ‘Being John Malkovich’. There are some great performances, with many of the actors playing real people. Nicolas Cage is convincing as both the laconic, perpetually depressed Charlie and the more joyous but less talented brother Donald. Meryl Streep is great as Susan Orlean the author of the book, and Chris Cooper is outstanding as the gap-toothed, eccentric orchid poacher John Laroche.

Charlie Kaufman and his fictional brother Donald are credited with the screenplay. They were both nominated for an Oscar, which was the first time a fictitious writer (Donald) has ever been nominated. They should have won.

The best sign that a film adaptation of a book is a good one is that it makes you want to go out and get the book it was adapted from. ‘Adaptation’ made me want to do just that, and I wasn’t disappointed – the book is great, with something funny or just plain bizarre on every page.