Adaptation

I really liked Adaptation a lot. There were whole realms of sub-plots for the careful movie-goer to catch and relish. For the first half of the movie, the movie is fairly one-dimensional; Charlie Kaufman is a complicated writer who doesn't know how to meet people. All he can really do is agonize over a script until a brilliant flash of insight flutters into his mind's eye. Then he analyzes it from every angle until he invariably finds a problem with the new take on his script and begins the problem over again. A fresh story, but nothing so groundbreaking yet.

The second half of the movie is where I became enthralled. Charlie attends a writing seminar his brother recommended (and up to that point Charlie had nothing but derisive things to say about this screenwriter's methods) and changes his perspective not only as to how he approaches writing but as to how he approaches life. After this point, the movie begins to spiral out of control. Crazy, unbelievable plot twists appear from nowhere. It seems as if the screenwriter's conviction that "exciting things happen everyday in real life" begins to come true. This is real-life Kaufman's critique of the movie industry. In trying to wrap everything up, in trying to tell an exciting story, Hollywood has become trite and inane. It really is the icing on the post-modern cake when, at the conclusion of the movie, Charlie Kaufman exits the garage composing what the end of the movie will be (It will be " Charlie Kaufman exits the garage composing what the end of the movie will be”) and in the end—surprise, surprise!—Charlie learn a moralistic lesson about life, despite his earlier, and perhaps more realistic claim, that there are no lessons in life that you just learn at the end of an ordeal.

Throughout the movie, there are little gems of ironic plotline for the careful observer to pick up on. The corny plot-devices the movie executive throws at Charlie in the first scene (Make the fall in love! Have a drug plot-line!) slyly become the plot of the movie we are watching, with almost no second-thought to the movie-goers. Silly ideas at the seminar--like incorporating a pop song into the movie--appear melodramatically and exclusively in the second half of the movie; the song is initially thrown in for no reason whatsoever, is later used in an overly action-packed chase scene to alleviate stress, and is finally used at Donald Kaufman's bedside. Charlie Kaufman's original critique of using a twin as a plot-advancer is cleverly inserted without the audience as much as asking itself, "Oh wait, the real-life Charlie Kaufman just did that to Adaptation Charlie Kaufman."

That perhaps is why I so enjoyed Adaptation. It was so self-aware, so referential to its own concepts of stories and placed meaning, that makes it so pleasurable. An attentive viewer leaves the movie like their consciousness has been expanded; in what direction, it is sometimes difficult to say.