How do you follow up a movie like Being John Malkovich? That's the question that screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (as played here by Nicolas Cage) is asking himself in Adaptation. Although he's coming off the back of an Oscar nominated film, Kaufman is finding it impossible to start work on his latest project, a screenplay of Susan Orlean's elusive book, The Orchid Thief. His writer's block is made all the more painful by his increasingly fractured social life and his twin (and rather annoying) sibling, Donald (Cage again) who decides to become a screenwriter, albeit one bent in a very commercial direction. Throw in Kaufman's growing interest in the private life of the writer of the Orchid Thief, and her relationship with one of the chief characters of her book and you've got one of the most original movies of the year.
This is a painfully inadequate summarisation of Adaptation, as the second collaboration between director Spike Jones and the real life Charlie Kaufman is simply one of those films that you have to see. The genesis of the screenplay is fact, a document of the troubles that Kaufman had when he tried to adapt The Orchid Thief. Once that is established, the screenwriter delights in blurring the line between fact and fiction, inventing a twin sibling and allowing the narrative to spill into an outlandish but extraordinarily clever direction in the final third. Truth be told, quibbles are few in this beautifully acted film. The only criticism I have is that occasionally Jones and Kaufman have a tendency to admire their own work, and revel a little too easily in their genius. But then again, when you've made a film as beguiling, bewitching and ultimately as brilliant as this, their restraint is quite remarkable. Utterly unmissable.
