Adaptation (15)

Being Charlie Kaufman

As with their first film, Being John Malkovich, the director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman have created in Adaptation a comedy of almost alarming quirkiness and originality. Unlike Being John Malkovich, which exhausted its maniacal invention about 45 minutes in, this new one comes close, breathtakingly close, to greatness. Its ostensible subject is the difficulty of turning a book into a movie, but in the course of its ludic narrative cross-pollination it blossoms into a profoundly touching and funny meditation on creativity, truth and love.

Big themes, though nothing about this rollicking metaphysical comedy seems to strain in their contemplation; rather, they seem to flower organically from the spiritual and artistic emergencies of its central characters. The crisis at its source was that of screenwriter Kaufman, who was originally hired to adapt Susan Orlean's non-fiction book The Orchid Thief. Stumped by the book's elusiveness, Kaufman eventually decided that his way into the screenplay would be to incorporate the difficulties of adaptation – and so Adaptation begins, with Hollywood screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) fretting over his typewriter: "Do I have an original thought in my head?" he wonders. We find out.

A sweaty, balding fellow in a check shirt, Charlie is tormented by self-doubt in his life and his work. It's not just that he's blocked by The Orchid Thief, he doesn't even know if he has the integrity required of a writer. His problems are somewhat exacerbated by the recent arrival of his identical twin brother Donald (also Cage), a vulgar opportunist who's also writing a screenplay – a serial killer movie of unbelievable crassness – and getting on with it tremendously. What's more, Donald is brimful of social confidence, while Charlie mopes around in his bedroom, a loner paralysed by indecision and regret. It's as if Woody Allen suddenly found himself sharing house-space with Jeffrey Archer.

Interwoven with this writerly ménage are scenes from the story Charlie is attempting to write. Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), a journalist with The New Yorker, is researching a book about a rangy backwoods botanist named John Laroche (Chris Cooper), a rough charmer who has been in trouble with the police for stealing a rare orchid from a Florida nature preserve. What intrigues Susan is the passion that Laroche brings to his study of orchids, a passion that her sophisticated New York friends wouldn't understand: they only see Laroche as an amusing crank who's missing his front teeth. "I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately," she reflects, a sentence Charlie seizes upon as he reads her book – he wants to know what it feels like too.

Screenwriting, sibling rivalry, orchid lore, the nature of passion: you may find yourself wondering where on earth this movie is going, and I fancy it isn't too much to speculate that Charlie Kaufman, the real one, may have asked himself the same question a few times. Remarkably, the story's odd rhythms and self-analysing uncertainty aren't irritating in the way another film might be – they're beguiling. Its drama is almost completely inward-looking, focused mainly around Charlie's blocked consciousness and his failing relationships with Donald, with the agent he keeps fobbing off, with the woman (Cara Seymour) he can't bring himself to ask out.

That's a lot of failure, and it's humanised quite magnificently by Nicolas Cage, a double performance to rival Jeremy Irons's twins in Dead Ringers. Cage, heavy-set and with thinning Brillo-pad hair, is closer to caricature in Donald, but in Charlie he exactly conveys the rising desperation of stalled creativity, outdoing even John Turturro's nervy screenwriter in Barton Fink. The difference being, the Coens scorned Fink for his lofty pretensions to art; Adaptation sees the comedy of the writer's dilemma and its pathos. Charlie "gets" The Orchid Thief, that's the poignancy, but he can't for the life of him work out how to adapt it.

Still, something has to give, and fascinating as things are, Charlie's struggles and the echoing motif of the orchids' evolutionary "adaptation" haven't the juice on their own to keep the film going. All the way through Donald has been parroting the precepts of screenwriting as learnt from seminar guru (and another real-life character) Robert McKee, much to the chagrin of Charlie, who deplores the cookie-cutter approach to writing movies – the three acts, the character "arc", the uplifting life lessons and so on. The irony, which we see coming a mile off, is the triumph of Donald's terrible script (entitled "The Three") and Charlie's eventual cry for help to McKee himself (played by Brian Cox) whom he buttonholes after a script seminar in New York. And what does the story guru advise? "Put a great ending on it", and an audience will forgive you anything.

Incredibly, Charlie heeds the advice. One can sense the precise moment, registered in Susan's pause, when the impasse Charlie's script has reached is barged aside by a melodramatic expedient, and suddenly a delicate story about friendship and orchid-hunting breaks into a wild gallop. The final 20 minutes packs in exactly the sort of crowd-pleasing stuff (sex, drugs, a car chase) that Charlie has laboured to avoid: the Hollywood ending, only much sillier. This creative implosion also sells short Streep and Cooper, whose quiet character studies lend the movie so much of its unusual texture. (Streep has one fantastic blissed-out moment when she imitates the musical dial tone on her telephone.)

Kaufman and Jonze, of course, are trying to have their cake and eat it. They want us to sympathise with Charlie's artistic bafflement, but also to understand Donald's appetite for trashy excitement; these are warring impulses within the same writer, Charlie Kaufman. The frantic finale is simply a parodic way of saying that it's difficult not to cop out. Fine, but did it have to be stupid with it? The mess of its ending wouldn't rankle if the rest of the movie were not so freakishly inspired, and so beautifully played. But I have a feeling the flawed, maddening nature of Adaptation will stay with you in any case, because there will be nothing else like it this year.