It's typical of the nerve, the bravado, the sheer giddy playfulness and sense of fun that characterize what has to be the boldest and most imaginative studio film of the year that "Adaptation," written by Charlie Kaufman, starts with a character plaintively asking, "Do I have an original thought in my head?"
It's not just any character who's worried, it's a woefully insecure writer named Charlie Kaufman who is agonizing over turning Susan Orlean's bestselling "The Orchid Thief" into a film. Which is exactly the problem the real-life Kaufman faced after he and his directing partner, Spike Jonze, took on the Orlean book after triumphing with the boundary-expanding "Being John Malkovich."
Wait, there's more. In writing "Adaptation," Kaufman has given himself an imaginary identical twin brother named Donald (a hangdog Nicolas Cage plays them both), who actually gets screen credit. Kaufman has taken real people like his agent, the studio executive who hired him, author Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her subject John Laroche (Chris Cooper in a career-changing performance), even screenwriting guru Robert McKee (Brian Cox) and turned them into half-fictional creatures of his imagination. And he's written a script about how he couldn't write a script that is not only dazzlingly funny but also a wonderful essay on the creative process, on why and how writers write and the outlandish places where passion and inspiration make their home.
Even more impressive is how intrinsically cinematic "Adaptation's" through-the-looking-glass narrative style is. The multiple ways the film self-referentially doubles back on itself are difficult to describe on the page but immediately accessible and easy to enjoy on screen. Kaufman and director Jonze, in effect the writer's psychic twin, count on our movie-savvy minds to understand cinema's potential for subterfuge and effortlessly make the illusion/reality/illusion leaps that are the heart of the film's appeal.
In a typical bit of business, the film's title turns out to have two parallel meanings. While in Hollywood adaptation is the process of turning a book into a film, in the plant world it refers to what "Orchid Thief" protagonist Laroche calls "a profound process" whereby mutable orchids "figure out how to thrive in the world."
