Charlie Kaufman's artistic life is the stuff of metafiction
Director: Spike Jonze Writer: Charlie Kaufman
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Cara Seymour, Tilda Swinton
Do I have an original thought in my head? My might-as-well-be-bald head? It’s been a Charlie Kaufman-esque kind of mornings for me ever since this Rapunzel pulled a G.I. Jane in a recent trip to the Philippines, where one has to peel off clothing from from one’s skin. (Speaking of Rapunzel: Tangled)
How do I even begin to praise Charlie Kaufman’s mind and balls for bringing his writing process – warts and all – to the big screen in 2002? Or should I force a contrarian out of me, vilify critically acclaimed films Armond White-style. I should. I should craft a car-crash-spectacle kind of review to send traffic congestion to my blog and attract torch- and pitchfork-bearing readers who, if they’re creative, should kidnap me, tie me down to a chair and torture me with bad-movie marathons ().
To do something different with this review . . . Would a meta-review be too gimmicky? I don’t want to be gushy, or pretentious, or be the reason why a teary-eyed screenwriter and a life coach are in the same room. Maybe a coffee and a muffin top would clear my head. Maybe a Panera Bread banana-nut “muffie,” which is what happens when you play God and crossbreed a muffin and a cookie, or watch too much Seinfeld.
But mutation, in the words of John Laroche (
Chris Cooper), who was supposed to be the prime mover of Kaufman’s film, “is great. It’s the way evolution moves ahead.”
Charlie Kaufman‘s film adaptation is a strata of adaptations. Laroche curiously adapts to the fleeting life of his passions with ease and with such discipline. New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean, who devours Laroche’s story as fodder for an article and, subsequently, a book, is in the cusp of change herself. There is something about Orlean waiting to happen. Meryl Streep saturates her character with such poetic desires that adaptation indeed seems like a very good thing.
Then we have Kaufman who exhibits a very Roarkian artistic principle and inadvertently steals the spotlight from his source material. Will he adapt and succumb to a more commercial adaptation of Orlean’s book or will he challenge the nature of moviegoers and defy the formulaic way that Hollywood attracts audiences?
So, I need to establish Charlie Kaufman’s strengths . . .
Kaufman’s interior angst is so naked it’s sexy, is so stripped to its soul it’s Mel Gibsonesque, is such a Titanic-slipping-perpendicular-in-the-Atlantic kind of wreck that it’s magnetic.
Kaufman, the thought trailblazer behind the inventive and uninhibited Being John Malkovich, and who pleads press shyness continues to be ironic in this metafictional film. He takes his neuroticism and perceived incompetence that he keeps from the media, and projects it unabashedly onto the silver screen.
Having a reputation for originality to uphold, he struggles to produce an unembellished but entertaining film based on Orlean’s book about Laroche, The Orchid Thief.
Did you see this one coming? A movie about flowers starred by A-list actors like Nicolas Cage, and Meryl Streep. Not in this world.
He employs an identical twin alter ego, Donald, who is his antithesis creatively: an easy-go-lucky guy who pens a derivative thriller script – the kind that fulfills audience expectations and thrives in Hollywood. Interspersed throughout the story of Kaufman’s artistic paralysis is one of Orleans’s creative prolificacy and insistent inspiration rushing and overflowing like a river during a storm.
If Charlie and Donald are identical twins who are complete opposites, Laroche is two personalities married in one body. A personality like Laroche’s is God’s gift to writers like Orleans. He is a “crazy white man” who can also be introspective and philosophical, making a New Yorker writer like Orleans, who has, by profession, no doubt come across a lot of personalities, pause with wonder.
The artistically sacred screenplay, the one to be as pure as a pristine ghost orchid, eventually deflowers itself with Hollywood conventions. Adaptation essentially condemns the Hollywood template but you don’t see a solution being offered at the end. At the same time, it accomplishes its goal of being original, while employing the very template it condemns. It lacks a real ending, yet there is a redeeming quality about this absence that makes the audience “feel” the ending, if not see it.
Watching this thing end, I find my butt inching itself forward until I’m just hanging by my tailbone, in complete shock at what I’m seeing: A mystery, a thriller about . . . the writing process. Will he finish the screenplay? Will he make his deadline? Will he sell out?
The fact that Kaufman has managed to turn un-cinematic material about flowers into a portal into his own brain and charge us more than ten bucks for it (not unlike his characters in Being John Malkovich paying to temporarily possess the titular character’s body and experiences) this is a writing nerd’s wet dream you’d want to revisit again and again.
