#16. Adaptation. (2002)
(director: Spike Jonze; starring Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper and Tilda Swinton)
It’s a movie about the making of itself. The audience watches scenes of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicholas Cage) write the very scene we are watching right now, creating an endless hall of mirrors effect of meta-reflexive self analysis. Kaufman’s goal was originally to write a screenplay based on the book “The Orchid Thief”, only to find that flowers don’t make very good drama, while the difficulty in adapting that work to film does, so the movie became about that instead. It is also a work of complete fiction, despite the fact that being about itself being about a non-fiction book would appear to, by definition, make it a non-fiction film, but such is genius of Charlie Kaufman. Constantly aware of the push-pull dynamic between representing real-life and the fictional sensationalism that’s necessary in any attempt to retell a story through celluloid no matter how hard one tries, Kaufman mixes Hollywood genre conventions with self-aware statements railing against said conventions to the point that it becomes impossible to tell where reality ends and storytelling begins, and then one realizes that ultimately there’s no distinction between the two. The movie simply “is”. It lives via the moviemaking process, effectively creating itself. As far as we know, the only other entity that is capable of creating itself is the universe. Yes, it’s just that kind of movie.
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