October 23, 2002

I literally jumped out of my seat with joy…

The last time I felt that way during a movie – equally bizarrely – was when I found myself tearing up over one of Anne V. Coates’ subtle but breathtaking cuts in Erin Brockovich.  Here, in a screening of Adaptation, that moment came when Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay took one of the most unexpected and deeply brilliant twists ever put on a page to be put on film.  To use a sports metaphor, it was like that crack of the bat at the bottom of the ninth in the seventh game of the World Series that you know means that the ball is going out of the park.  The moment comes at the second-third act break and the entire third act felt like that time while the ball is in the air… “Go out… go out… come on… get out… go, baby, go…

Of course, things happen.  Balls go foul.  Players make impossible catches.  And that could have happened to Kaufman and director Spike Jonze and his band of merry (wo)men.  But it didn’t.  Kaufman and Jonze ride this bucking bronco to the very end and into movie history.

I am almost afraid of damning this film with excess praise, but I have to say, not only is Adaptation the best American film of 2002… and I’m not sure that anything else even comes close… but this screenplay may be the best screenplay ever written… period.  All time. 

There are lost of great screenplays and the standard I am using is my own.  The first big hurdle is perfection… and I can’t think of a single word or moment that I would change here.  But what takes this screenplay higher for me is that Kaufman uses all the rules of structure, while breaking all the rules of structure, while never telling the audience how clever he is.  For them, it’s just a movie.  But this is far more than a great story well told.  I don’t even know that this is really a great story in the high-minded way we think of great stories.  It is more.  It is a true masterpiece.  This is a small, intimate film with  moments that for movie lovers will have all the impact of the great moments of the great epics of film history.

It is quite frustrating to hold my tongue (fingers?) about specific moments.  But the greater the work, the greater the joy of experiencing it for yourself, fresh and mysterious and yours to process in the way you process.  I can only hope that no one else will thoughtlessly ruin anyone’s experience of discovery with this film.

The safe take is that the film is based on the Susan Orlean New Yorker story and book, The Orchid Thief, which tells the true story of John Laroche, orchid thief and singular human being.   But the film also tells the story of Charles Kaufman (aka Charlie), screenwriter, self-loather and deeply sad human being.  What Kaufman manages to do so brilliantly is to tell both stories in a thoughtful, engaging, unforgiving way.  But make no mistake, while many of the details of The Orchid Thief are not to be found in Adaptation, the heart of that book is there and beating fiercely.  Every time Kaufman seems to have taken a wrong step, he brings us back onto the road, with a clearer vision than you had before.

The performances are, simply, spectacular.  The only really showy role in the movie belong to Nic Cage, who plays Charlie Kaufman and his brother Donald… a brother that does not exist in real life, but who receives a shared screenwriting credit nonetheless.  With his pate shining through his thinning hair and looking heavier than normal, Cage hits every note just right. 

One of Jonze’s strengths as a director here is that he has brought together an ensemble of great actors and his camera is not shy about letting their faces tell the story.  Another amazing moment in this film is when Cara Seymour, playing a potential love interest named Amelia, is smiling and seductive and just a moment later, frustrated, she seems to have the same look on her face… but you can see that the entire world has changed for her.  It is a magical moment that Jonze had the skill and patience to let occur without words.  As the movie progresses, Meryl Streep gets a number of those kinds of moments, as does Cage.  This is beautiful work that should not be undervalued.  Jonze is showing the patience, in a comedy, to stay with his characters in the way that makes Michael Mann one of our very best dramatic directors.

And while we are on the subject of beauty… Adaptation has one of the most compelling casts of women every put in the same film.  One of the themes of the film is that what matters is what we love, not whether we are loved back.  Jonze and Kaufman and casting directors Justine Baddeley & Kim Davis-Wagner have a taste in women that could not be much closer to my own.  And though they will never know me, much less love me, I feel love for each of them… which you feel through the film that Kaufman, man and character, must feel for each of these extraordinary women.   Meryl Streep leads the way, looking her age and beautiful and sexy.  In small supporting roles, Judy Greer and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Tilda Swinton are each just right. 

And the previously mentioned Cara Seymour is astounding, really.  Not just because she is shy and sexy and so vulnerable in her scenes with Kaufman/Cage.  But because this is the same actress who played the street hooker in American Psycho and David Morse’s shrewish wife in Dancer in The Dark.  (Funny, she didn’t look shrewish!)  In those films, she looked hard and angry.  Here, she is a beautiful, real-looking, sexy, grown-up woman with the soft face of an angel.  And while I credit her for her performance, I must give a big hand to Jonze for finding this performance in this woman.  Just lovely.  Women should be fighting to work with this director and not just because he makes hits.

I’m 1000 words in and I haven’t even mentioned Chris Cooper.  He is, as usual, perfect.  He might have the hardest role in the movie.  He plays a guy who is completely unappealing and has to become intoxicating… without ever changing.  It’s one of my favorite Cooper roles because he gets to have a little more fun here than usual.  Instead of playing “the uptight guy,” he gets to play the guy who lives in a small world that somehow has infinite boundaries. 

Jonze’s other great strength is his ability with landscapes and the performances he gets from non-humans.  Digital Domain does some great work for Jonze here, but it is Jonze’s sense of touch that makes it work so well.  Never has pollination been so sexy.  After all, Kaufman is trying to write a movie about flowers… never been done… until now.

This film does face a real challenge when it comes to Oscar.  The third act twists could turn some of the Academy audience off.  This is where I come back to yesterday’s column.   If America’s critics cannot get Adaptation into that Top Five… if we cannot help Academy members understand what they might otherwise write off as “weird”… if we can not get a film this good at least nominated… then what good are we.  This is a film that calls for advocacy.  And by asking for it, I fear that some will react against it out of nothing but spite.  But we all search for that movie grail every week and we find plastic cups littering an increasingly sticky floor.  Adaptation is a true original.  A gift.  We must appreciate it.

For my part, I will write in greater detail about the structure of the film in the future.  It’s too early now and there is no point.  But I’d love to come up with one strong paragraph explaining the genius of the third act… before people have a chance to look the other way.  It’s one of my frustrations as a critic that I will have a conversation with someone about a film after the fact, and the explanation of one little fact or moment changes their entire perception of the film.  This happened just days ago with a very smart person who just didn’t put together the last ten minutes of The Ring, and how that ten minutes makes the entire rest of the movie make sense.  It is one of the things about that movie that I really like.  But once we discussed it, he felt a little better about the film.  A simple map of this film would do wonders for the Oscar campaign.  There are many films for which I will root.  But the success of this film would make me proud of the Academy, much as the Best Picture nominations for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Traffic did a couple of years ago.

There are still a few potential contenders to the Hall of Fame still to come this year.  But as of now, the two truly great films of 2002 to date are complex, demanding, funny, sad, horrible works of true genius.  The other film is City of God, which is a completely different experience, but also shows a remarkable degree of storytelling mastery.  Adaptation… oy… I can’t think of a single writer and director team (this disqualifies co-directors and writer-directors), since Robert Bolt and David Lean, whose combined efforts seem so symbiotic… so singular.  And they are just getting started!  This is Jonze’s second feature and Kaufman’s third produced screenplay. 

This film is why I love film.

Notes For The Geek Sheets:  Just so y’all can correct your sites… Jane Adams is no longer in the film.  Neither is Lupe Ontiveros or Stephen Toblowsky.  Cara Seymour has, I would say, the second biggest female role as Amelia and should be added to all cast lists.  Also, Coming Attractions points out that the film was shot in Santa Clarita under the name The 3.  That is because the name of a screenplay that comes up in the film. 

READER OF THE DAY:  BT PHONE HOME writes:  “My favorite Ebert show was when Scorsese was talking about the greatest films of the decade. Why?  Not because he was a famous director, but because he knew more about film than anyone I’ve ever heard This is why I love to read critics. The good ones love movies, but the really good film people, the cream of the crop are directing our movies. You know why I get pissed off at certain movies, because at the end of the day I think that Simon West has no idea what is going on in film, he is a reflection of those critics that aren’t true believers.

Why did Spielberg like Attack of the Clones? Because George is his best buddy? I don’t think so, with any great director something more is going on that sometimes we just don’t see. These guys see it, when people finally saw it in Eyes Wide Shut (I’m still looking) or it clicked with Kundun.  It is this hidden brilliance, this dialogue with film that we don’t have because as much as we do know, on some days, hell many days we are just “going to the movies”. I think it goes back to these directors just knowing more than we do and being far more passionate about what film means to them and their own responsibility to that ideal. That is why most do not care what critics say of their work.  They care mostly at what their colleagues think because those are the people that not only love film, but they are the some of the most knowledgeable people in the field.

Dave, I have no doubt that you could direct movies if you wanted to, but I don’t think that right now you could like they do. Or I could. Or even the masterful Roger Ebert. We aren’t there to make these things.  We are there to watch them.  But most of these knee-jerk reactions by most critics are grievously uninformed on whether a film is valuable or not. What the mass consumption public wants is another topic I’m sure. Good filmmaking is a critical dialogue with movies. We just seem to forget that. I found an interesting quote from the well-respected author Toni Morrison:

Someone asked her as a child did she want to become a writer?

She responded ‘No I wanted to be a reader’ “

VIN NOT DIESEL writes:  “If you really want to get some good consistent criticism, check out Dave Kehr's old capsule reviews at the Chicago Reader. Type in Hitchcock or Preminger or Hawks or Walsh or Welles or Eastwood or Tourneur or any of the others mentioned in the American Cinema: Directors and directions in the keywords to the brief

reviews and voila! Some of the most prescient and beautiful film criticism that has ever been put to paper. He rarely takes pleasure in giving a negative review, concentrating mostly on trying to transfer some amount of the obvious, extraordinary pleasure he gets in watching the works of the masters. To my mind, I haven't seen a single critic who has stuck to his auteurist guns as Kehr has. Take a look at this interview :

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/15/kehr.html

Kehr remains an unrepentant, righteous Kael-basher (much like Richard Schickel; greatly under-rated, truly passionate) and goes on to point out  the same problems in film criticism today that you had also mentioned. I recently came across a 1999 Film Comment issue where he passionately defended Eastwood's True Crime. There is also his extraordinary defense of Robert Zemeckis and Forrest Gump in one of the 1995 Film Comment editions. These are pieces which reflect his undying love for the cinema, particularly the American cinema. Why does this man have to be the occasional fourth man in the NYT list when he could run circles round all three of the regulars with both legs cut off?!

On the subject of Film Comment, Kent Jones and Gavin Smith (and Richard Jameson before them) are great film critics who don't get too much play. At least not as much as I would like.

The two Reader critics, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Fred Camper, are right up there with Kehr in terms of depth of knowledge of film as well as incredible skill in writing. I don't think I need to praise Jonathan Rosenbaum, since he is widely recognized as one of the

best in the world. But Fred Camper (www.fredcamper.com) is another one of those obscure auteurists you come across by some happy chance and fall in love instantly. Check out his essays on Mizoguchi, Preminger and Welles.

I would also mention David Ehrenstein, Tag Gallagher, Chris Fujiwara, Tom Gunning and James Naremore. I don't know what publication Ehrenstein works for currently, but if there is one piece of film criticism that I would take with me to a desert island it would be his defense of Dracula in the Jan 1993 edition of Film Comment. That and Jean-Luc Godard's review of Raoul Walsh's A Distant Trumpet (1964) in Cahiers du Cinema.

All of these gentlemen need to be given the 100 k that you would give Mike Wilmington (a genius, I concur) annually. A quick word in for the much maligned Richard Corliss. I know of few critics who would undertake the largely thankless task of exploratory film criticism that he did with Talking Pictures. And with such fluency and vigour. A great book for lovers of the cinema.

Of course, it goes without saying that the ghost of the great Sarris is ever present in this discussion. I haven't seen another critic in this country who influenced such a wonderful and varied set of critics. Indeed, Andre Bazin would be his French counterpart.”

E ME:  No need to call for the ghost.  Sarris is alive and well right here.  Anyone else wish to nominate any others for greatness?