#6 Adaptation.

Adaptation is written by a man who writes himself as two men, one of which is writing about the writing process involved in writing an adaptation about a book written by a woman about a man.

While that previous sentence may have been a bit of a spoiler, it is probably so nonsensical to someone who hasn't seen this movie that it doesn't matter anyway. So let me try this again.

Adaptation is written by twin brothers Charlie and Donald Kaufman and staring the characters of Charlie and Donald Kaufman, the latter of which isn't a real person. Okay, this still doesn't make sense but I'll keep on going.

Nicholas Cage plays both twins in his most critically acclaimed performance outside of Leaving Las Vegas. Donald is an idiot, but happy, popular, and very successful with women. Charlie is a renowned genius in Hollywood as the mind behind Being John Malkovich(as he is in real life). But he is depressed, very self-critical, bitter, a loner and despite his talent with the written word, he can barely talk to a woman that he finds attractive.

Charlie is working on his next script, but he has an incredibly bad case of writer's block. It's an adaptation of the book "The Orchid Thief" written by Susan Orlean(once again, a real book and a real person). Charlie loves this book and the way that Orlean goes into the beauty behind orchids as well as the oddity behind the main person she profiles, John Laroche. But he just doesn't see how he can make it into a movie. There's no explosions or murders. No steamy love affair and not even a real conclusion. The story is too much like real life, and no movie studio wants that.

The movie within the movie is the actual adaptation of "The Orchid Thief" itself. Meryl Streep who, despite being 60, might just be the most prolific actress in the world right now, gives a soft performance as Susan Orlean. At least at first. Chris Cooper won an Oscar for his portrayal of the orchid thief himself. He's a dirty hick and the last person who you would expect to be a genius when it comes to flowers. But his passion for plants and the way that they adapt(Ah! Now you get the play-on-words in this film's title) is so contagious that you can see why Orlean finds him so fascinating.

But that's it. Nothing happens between Orlean and Laroche, and both go back to their old lives. How can Kaufman fill up a movie with a story like that? Well, within the movie itself, Kaufman decides that in order to fill up more pages, his "Orchid Thief" adaptation should also include the story behind the writing of "The Orchid Thief". There is then an incredible scene where we see the Kaufman character narrating the exact actions that he was engaging in at the beginning of the movie. This movie is sometimes so self-referential that you feel like your brain is going to explode.

In the meantime, Donald decides that he too would like to become a screenwriter. Donald starts writing a story about a criminal, the person he kidnaps, and the cop. And the twist at the end turns out to be that they're all one person suffering from multiple personality disorder. Charlie criticizes Donald for not only coming up with such a used up twist, but for the logistics of one person kidnapping and chasing himself. In this way Adaptation is not only about Charlie Kaufman's writing process, but a great movie about the writing of movies.

While Adaptation is critical of movie stereotypes, it also acknowledges its own hypocrisy. For example, despite the Charlie Kaufman character being critical of Donald for writing such a cliché plot, the real Charlie Kaufman has written himself into the movie as two people. Eventually Charlie becomes so desperate to finish his screenplay, that off of Donald's suggestion he attends a screenwriting class(which is the epitome of everything Charlie hates about screenwriting). During a lecture the speaker informs the crowd that they should never use voice-overs. This is all of course going on in the middle of a Nicholas Cage voice-over.

Afterward, Charlie meets the speaker, played by Brian Cox, in person. By this point Kaufman has already gotten "The Orchid Thief" part of his screenplay done, as well as the part of the screenplay which described his adaptation of "The Orchid Thief" done. But as was the case with "The Orchid Thief", real life doesn't have conclusive endings. It doesn't have the stuff you see in movies. And how can Charlie adapt this book, as well as his life, in a fair way if it's not real?

That's BS, Cox tells him. In real life, everyday, people are born and they get killed. People fall in love and fall out of love. And what follows from that point on I will not spoil, but to suffice it to say, indicates that the real life Kaufman decided to follow that advice. Which means that he was either acknowledging the validity of it or making a mockery of it.

That is if anybody has any idea what the hell Kaufman is ever talking about.