Adaptation

In "Being John Malkovich", director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman went off on a wild flight of fancy. It is not much different in the duo's second film Adaptation, where you have to concentrate more than usual to make head or tail of the story - or perhaps you should simply let yourself be carried away.

The story of "Adaptation" is well-nigh impossible to summarise, but at the beginning the thread is still clear. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman has just been offered a new assignment after his work on "Being John Malkovich". He is to write the screenplay for Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief, but things are not really going well for Charlie. He feels fat, forty and finished, and on top of that he cannot really get started on the screenplay. It does not help that his twin brother Donald is a hit with the ladies, is eternally optimistic and is churning out a screenplay of his own. Donald goes in for action and drama by the book, but Charlie wants to create an original and sensitive screenplay without Hollywood's heavy clichés.

At the same time, the film shows in flashbacks Susan Orlean's encounter with the orchid hunter and oddball John Laroche, and slowly the film's different levels begin to merge, so that it becomes completely impossible to tell fiction from reality. The question is whether one should look for some deeper message in "Adaptation" or simply see it as a witty and self-referential (and somewhat self-absorbed) game with genres and layers of reality. You are certainly entertained, but by the end you are also somewhat exhausted.

The English title Adaptation means both 'adjustment' and the 'reworking' of a text with a view to filming it. This double meaning is lost in the Danish title. Perhaps this is where one should start looking for a higher meaning.