Revisiting Adaptation.

Charlie Kaufman is nothing if not an original. Love them or hate them, his screenplays have made their way into the cult consciousness(Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich) . Whether his weirdness is brilliance or just, well, weirdness, is up to the audience I suppose. The Spike Jonze-directed Adaptation is perhaps the definition of self-indulgence. Faced with the task of adapting Susan Orlean's non-fiction book, "The Orchid Thief," Kaufman found himself with a case of profound writer's block. So naturally, he wrote a screenplay about his writer's block, inserting himself into the story (along with a fictional twin brother) along with a fictionalized version of Orlean played by Meryl Streep.

First off, I just love that somehow Jonze and Kaufman were able to get this movie made. It takes balls for a screenwriter to write a screenplay about screenwriting and confront its difficulties by inserting a real-life book and person into a story about the lack of story that exists in the source material while commenting on the contrived gimmicks screenwriters use to get attention while having your film climax in all of those gimmicks and cliches.

Does that summation make sense?

I recently re-watched Adaptation for the first time since seeing it five years ago. On my first viewing, I was unsure of how to respond. I was unfamiliar with Kaufman and Jonze for the most part, so the abrupt tonal changes and multiple layers of reflexivity threw me off. Upon watching it again, i was struck by how magnificently this seemingly impossible idea was pulled off. Kaufman confronts all of his own neuroses by bearing them for his audience through Nicholas Cage's performance. Yet the film never feels to self-congratulatory. It's about the difficulties of storytelling, and the messiness of the story told within that premise is kind of the whole wonderfully self-deprecating bent of this insane movie. In short, it blew my mind.