Adaptation

‘Adaptation’ is the second movie by Spike Jonze, after ‘Being John Malkovich’. It has one of the most original and funniest opening scenes I know: protagonist Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicholas Cage) enters the set of ‘Being John Malkovich’ and is brutally sent away by the director.

Then a film starts which is almost impossible to review, because it is an ingenious story, about an ambitious screenwriter, who works on an adaptation of a book called ‘The Orchid Thief’. A meeting with the writer of the book, Suzanne (Meryl Streep), influences him to adjust the script and he becomes a part of his own script, something which becomes very credible in the skilled hands of Spike Jonze. And as if this wasn’t complicated enough, the protagonist has an identical twin brother called Donald (a magnificent double role of Nicholas Cage), who is also working on a script, one that lives up to all Hollywood cliches.

The smart thing about the film is that the two scripts also get intertwined. In this way ‘Adaptation’ becomes not only the quest of an ambitious script writer who gets stuck in the script he has to adapt, but halfway it gets also exciting thriller elements.