The funniest line in "Adaptation," the still-resonating black comedy starring Nicolas Cage as tormented screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, isn't in the movie. It's in the film's press kit.
As the now-familiar story goes, Kaufman, an Oscar nominee for his screenplay for "Being John Malkovich," was hired to adapt Susan Orlean's nonfiction book "The Orchid Thief" to the screen. Yet, despite his previous success, the production notes explain, Kaufman was still "plagued by insecurities."
Only a studio press kit would make such an assertion as though it were inexplicable -- and vaguely unseemly. After all, "success" equals "secure" -- right?
Wrong, as this film, directed by Spike Jonze, makes clear.
The film's journey to the screen is a unique one. After accepting the assignment to adapt Orlean's story about a charismatic and unlikely orchid thief named John Laroche, Kaufman found himself in the grip of a crippling writer's block.
Unable to turn Orlean's personal, lyrical prose into conventional screen narrative, Kaufman instead wrote a script about this very dilemma. His lead character is not Laroche, but a hapless, woefully insecure screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman, going crazy trying to adapt the book.
If you haven't yet seen it, let it suffice to say that in the course of the story, Charlie goes on to meet Orlean herself, Laroche, screenwriting guru Robert McKee, and some very nasty alligators before the film comes to its surprising and curiously moving conclusion.
As a former screenwriter myself, now a therapist who works with writers, I was struck by how accurately the film depicts the harrowing mesh of self-loathing, envy, rage and feigned cynicism that is the screenwriter's world.
Whether trying unsuccessfully to explain his concerns to his agent, fending off polite-though-suspicious inquiries by studio execs who want to know when they can expect to see pages, or clinging precariously to his sanity in the face of material that will not work, Charlie Kaufman's ordeal is one that every screenwriter will recognize.
Unfortunately. And hilariously.
Take, for example, the many scenes of Charlie's bearlike, bathrobed body shuffling aimlessly between rooms, or lying face down over the edge of his bed, or face up for a sobering, unchanging view of his stucco ceiling. He's trapped -- in his body, in his house, in his life; a bundle of raw nerves, and yet all that mental energy leads only to a kind of physical and psychological inertia.
