Adaptation

*This blog entry will be the first in a series of entries where I will discuss my experience in my film adaptation class, my thoughts on the films viewed in that class, and other related topics.

I’m guilty of hating on Nicholas Cage. I do it all the time. Outside of Ben Affleck, he’s my go-to guy to make fun of when I’m bashing on awful actors. And usually no one says a thing. Usually they just laugh and agree. Since Con Air, he’s essentially become the Nickelback of acting.

But every now and then someone will take offense to my taunting, and they’ll try to defend him. They’ll point out his roles in top notch films like Face Off and The Wickerman remake. And of course who could forget his charming portrayal of Speckles the mole in G-Force?

Okay, so maybe they just tell me to watch Adaptation.

And I tell them “no,” even though it’s a Spike Jonze film. After all, it’s got Nicholas Cage playing two parts in the same film. How awful does that sound?

So finally I’m forced to watch it for this class, and you know what? I was wrong. The guy can act. Kinda.

Adaptation may not be the textbook definition of an experimental film, but it was certainly an experiment. When I got home I had to look it up and get the skinny on what happened and what was just metafiction. Here’s what I found out: It’s true that Charlie Kaufman was tapped to write a script based on the non-fiction book The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. It’s true that he drove himself half-crazy struggling with how to go about adapting a book “about flowers.” It’s true that when he turned it in, he was pretty sure he was committing career suicide.

But Orlean isn’t a drugged out lunatic (so-far as we know), and she didn’t have an affair with her subject, and Charlie doesn’t have a twin brother named Donald. Orlean also didn’t try to murder him, though when he turned in the script it’s possible she was tempted to. So let’s talk about experimental film.

Experimental films can be a crutch that writers or directors rely on. Much like experimental music, it’s often used to justify a lack of basic compositional skills. The old idea “You’ve got to learn the rules before you can break them,” has been largely abandoned by the art scene today, and people pretty much just shit out whatever self-serving idea they come up with.

But then sometimes someone comes along with a movie like Fellini’s 8½ or Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, and it’s so wholly original that you wonder why everyone doesn’t aspire to reinvent the wheel.

But is that really how it works for anyone? Does anyone plan to reinvent the wheel? Do Wilco and Radiohead call yearly band meetings and discuss how their next albums are going to radically alter the public’s sonic perceptions about music? Maybe, I’m not sure how pretentious those guys are. But most likely they’re just a bunch of nerdy white dudes trying to make music they take joy and pride in. The sweeping influence is just a byproduct of their genius.

Is Charlie Kaufman a genius? Is Spike Jonze a genius? Is every Wilco and Radiohead album genius ? That depends on who you ask.

If you ask me, this movie is genius and it’s genius because it doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, it just does.

I wish there was a better way to put it, but it’s really just a cast and crew dedicated to making something completely bizarre and original work. And it does. But why?

I’m not sure I’m qualified to speak for everyone, but here’s my answer to that:

Everything from the false intros and strange time jumps to the meta dialogue is written, acted, and directed with a sense of honesty. So much that at the end, it’s hard to determine what is true and what is fiction. This instills the movie with a sense of humanity, even if it is a sad, lonely, self-loathing, masturbating sense of humanity.

And that goes back to what I was talking about, about how you can’t set out to reinvent the wheel, it just happens. And what happened here is that I gained a newfound respect for Nicholas Cage. So alright, maybe the guy isn’t the worst actor of all-time. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to try to like him in every movie he’s in from now on. It just means I’ll just give it a chance and see what happens.