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Wednesday, February 07, 2007

You are what you love ...

... not what loves you.

Or so says Donald Kaufman in my DVD rental of the week, the movie, Adaptation, which stars Nick Cage (as both Donald and Charlie Kauffman), Chris Cooper, and Meryl Streep ...

Adaptation. is a 2002 film directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufman.... The screenplay is based on a true story. After the success of his screenplay for Being John Malkovich, Kaufman was hired to write a screenplay based on Susan Orlean's book, The Orchid Thief. However, he soon realized that the book simply couldn't be filmed. As he came under increasing pressure to turn in a screenplay, the "adaptation" became a story of a screenwriter's attempt to write a screenplay about a book that can't be adapted into a screenplay ...


- Charlie Kauffman anguishes in front of his typewriter

I appreciated the movie most for that line Donald spoke (you are what you love, not what loves you) - I want so much for it to be true - but I rented it because it's about script writing. I harbor a (probably unrealistic) hope that someday I'll write a screenplay. I'm having a hard time with it, as it's so different from writing short stories. The formatting is a challenge, the length (I page = I minute of screen time) is odd, and the POV is not that of a single character, or even mutiple characters, but that of the viewer ... argh! So, it was intriguing to watch Adaptation, which offered a strangely amusing insight into how scripts are written ... and I so much saw myself in the character of Charlie, it almost made my skin crawl.

Here's some of Roger Ebert's review of the movie ...

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What a bewilderingly brilliant and entertaining movie this is--a confounding story about orchid thieves and screenwriters, elegant New Yorkers and scruffy swamp rats, truth and fiction. "Adaptation" is a movie that leaves you breathless with curiosity, as it teases itself with the directions it might take. To watch the film is to be actively involved in the challenge of its creation.

It begins with a book titled The Orchid Thief, based on a New Yorker article by Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep). She writes about a Florida orchid fancier named John Laroche (Chris Cooper), who is the latest in a long history of men so obsessed by orchids that they would steal and kill for them. Laroche is a con man who believes he has found a foolproof way to poach orchids from protected Florida Everglades; since they were ancestral Indian lands, he will hire Indians who can pick the orchids with impunity.

Now that story might make a movie, but it's not the story of "Adaptation." As the film opens, a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) has been hired to adapt the book, and is stuck. There is so much about orchids in the book, and no obvious dramatic story line. Having penetrated halfway into the book myself, I understood his problem: It's a great story, but is it a movie? Charlie is distraught. His producer, Valerie (Tilda Swinton), is on his case. Where is the first draft? He hardly has a first page. He relates his agony in voiceover, and anyone who has ever tried to write will understand his system of rewards and punishments: Should he wait until he has written a page to eat the muffin, or ...

Charlie has a brother named Donald (also played by Cage). Donald lacks Charlie's ethics, his taste, his intelligence. He cheerfully admits that all he wants to do is write a potboiler and get rich. He attends the screenwriting seminars of Robert McKee (Brian Cox), who breaks down movie classics, sucks the marrow from their bones and urges students to copy the formula. At a moment when Charlie is suicidal with frustration, Donald triumphantly announces he has sold a screenplay for a million dollars ......

There are real people in this film who are really real, like Malkovich, Jonze, John Cusack and Catherine Keener, playing themselves. People who are real but are played by actors, like Susan Orlean, Robert McKee, John Laroche and Charlie Kaufman. People who are apparently not real, like Donald Kaufman, despite the fact that he shares the screenplay credit. There are times when we are watching more or less exactly what must (or could) have happened, and then a time when the film seems to jump the rails and head straight for the swamps of McKee's theories.

During all of its dazzling twists and turns, the movie remains consistently fascinating not just because of the direction and writing, but because of the lighthearted darkness of the performances. Chris Cooper plays a con man of extraordinary intelligence, who is attractive to a sophisticated New Yorker because he is so intensely himself in a world where few people are anybody. Nicolas Cage, as the twins, gets so deeply inside their opposite characters that we can always tell them apart even though he uses no tricks of makeup or hair. His narration creates the desperate agony of a man so smart he understands his problems intimately, yet so neurotic he is captive to them ......

I sat up during this movie. I leaned forward. I was completely engaged. It toyed with me, tricked me, played straight with me, then tricked me about that. Its characters are colorful because they care so intensely; they are more interested in their obsessions than they are in the movie, if you see what I mean. And all the time, uncoiling beneath the surface of the film, is the audacious surprise of the last 20 minutes, in which--well, to say the movie's ending works on more than one level is not to imply it works on only two.

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If you like looking behind the movie camera, it's worth a watch, especially for the fun of Donald (sic) Kauffman's script writing style ... he used all the worst cliches (car chases, serial killers, gratuitous sex scenes) and they ended up suceeding so very well :-)


- the two Kauffman brothers and their different styles of working on a script


6 Comments:

Blogger Sabine said...

I'm so glad you posted this Crystal - I'm definitely going to rent it.

3:52 AM  
Blogger crystal said...

Hi Maureen ... :-)

11:05 AM  
Blogger cowboyangel said...

Hi Crystal.

You know who really impressed me in Adaptation was Chris Cooper. I had just seen him in Sea Biscuit, in a totally different kind of role, and I couldn't believe he was the same guy. He's become one of my favorite current actors.

Have you ever seen Paris When It Sizzles, with William Holden and Audrey Hepburn? Holden is a burned-out/washed-up screenwriter who's waited till the last minute to finish his new script. He hires a young secretary, Audrey, to type it for him as he dictates. She begins adding her own touches, and (of course) the two begin to fall in love. It's a very post-modern film for 1964, as you go from the scenes of them working on the screenplay to the story of the screenplay itself, kind of like in Adaptation. It wasn't a big hit when it came out, and some people still don't like it much, but I thought it was very inventive, funny, charming, and had some good things to say about the creative process. Plus, it's Bill Holden and Audrey Hepburn! They had actually been lovers in real life. Holden always said she was his one true love, and he was heartbroken when she married someone else. It must have been difficult for them to do the film, but they did have good chemistry on screen, as well as off.

Another good "screenplay" movie is a quirky, independent film from 1992, called In the Soup. Steve Buscemi is trying to get his screenplay produced, and an off-the-wall gangster guy, the great Seymour Cassel, says he's going to produce it, only they never seem to get around to actually making the movie.

Oh, and William Holden as the screenwriter in one of the greatest films of all-time, and maybe the best one ever about Hollywood: Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd..

I wonder what other films are about writing screenplays?

11:46 AM  
Blogger crystal said...

I've seen Sunset Blvd - that was great. I'll have to look up the other Holden movie you mentioned - I really like him. I haven't seen many of his movies, but remember him because he liked Stephany Powers (I think?) and they visited Africa a lot and were animal lovers.

Steve Buscemi - an interesting guy! I liked him most recently in the science fiction movie The Island ... he tries to explain to two clones (Ewan MacGregor and Scarlet Johnason) that they are just like replacement part s for their owners BMWs :-)

2:24 PM  
Blogger cowboyangel said...

Yes, Holden and Powers were a couple towards the end of his life. He did love animals and started a famous animal preserve in Kenya, where he spent most of his time.

It's funny, I didn't know much about Holden until a couple of years ago. We were doing a little film cycle of Billy Wilder movies, which included Sunset Blvd. and Stalag 17, for which Holden won the Oscar for Best Actor. We liked him so much, we decided to do a cycle of his films afterwards. And now we'll try to watch another one every so often, because we like him a lot. If you haven't seen Stalag 17, that's excellent. Other faves: Sabrina, with him and Audrey and Bogart. Very funny. Born Yesterday, with Judy Holliday, who won Best Actress for her role. A hilarious and wonderful film - more hers than Bill's, but he's very charming in it. The Country Girl, with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly. That's more serious, but very good. La Reina liked that one a lot. Picnic, Bridge on the River Kwai, The World of Suzie Wong and The Counterfeit Traitor are also very good. Oh, and The Wild Bunch. And there are other very good ones as well.

That's probably waaaay more information than you wanted.

2:46 PM  
Blogger crystal said...

Thanks for the recommendations. I've only seen Sbrina and the Wild Bunch of the ones you mentioned, so that gives me a lot to look forward to :-)

4:09 PM  

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