The Travolta/Cage Project #71 Adaptation (2002)
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
Nicolas Cage’s more or less universally acclaimed performance in Pig serves as a welcome reminder that the Face/Off icon is more than just a living meme and/or charismatic lunatic with an electric personality. When he’s not squandering his talent for easy paydays in the direct-to-video thrillers that have made him the King of RedBox, Cage is one of our finest and most powerful actors.
Spike Jonze’s 2002 meta comedy-drama Adaptation illustrates unforgettably that Cage can do so much more as an actor and a movie star than just his crazy Nicolas Cage shtick, although as someone who has devoted the next few years of my life to the man’s late-period work I gotta concede that in the right context Cage doing his crazy Nicolas Cage shtick can be utterly delightful. In the wrong context, it can still be a hoot and a half.
Cage doesn’t just give one performance for the ages in Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman’s exploration of the art of storytelling and our eternal ache for human connection and transcendence: he gives a pair of Oscar-worthy turns that provide a perfect showcase for the dueling halves of Cage’s larger than life persona.
Cage’s Oscar-nominated turn as a fictionalized version of real-life Being John Malkovich and Adaptation screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, a neurotic, balding and overweight wordsmith drowning in an endless sea of self-doubt and sweaty self-loathing as he struggles to adapt Susan Orlean’s non-fiction book The Orchid Thief for the big screen taps into Cage the brooding, Oscar-winning method actor who pours his heart and soul into his work, who is a true artist as well as an actor and a movie star.
The juicy role of Charlie’s fictional twin brother Donald, a golden retriever puppy of an optimist who skips gingerly through life without a care in the world while his brother marinates in his own ever-present flop sweat, is a terrific vehicle for Cage the entertainer, the movie star who exudes child-like joy in his own extraordinary gifts, whose love of performing is palpable and infectious.
This divide between art and entertainment is reflected in the work the brothers create. Charlie wants to break free from the dreary strictures of cliches and conventions and lazy commercial formula and articulate something profound and real about the universe and its infinite complexity.
Donald, however, wants to shamelessly and unapologetically exploit the rich treasure trove of cliches, convention and formula available to hack writers like himself to write an exceedingly commercial script that will score him a fuck-ton of money.
We laugh at Donald because he is a fool, a vulgarian and an overgrown child on a perpetual sugar rush but Cage brings a sweetness and guilelessness to the performance that renders him unexpectedly sympathetic. In his own curious way, Donald he is a good brother and a good friend in addition to being a gleeful, oblivious idiot.
As someone who wrote a book (You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me) about the difficulties of writing a book, I found myself relating to Charlie Kaufman’s existential crisis like never before.
Adaptation is about flowers and the innate human hunger for meaning but it’s also about a balding, overweight, painfully self-conscious and self-aware Jewish writer who thinks he’s a real piece of shit and struggles with just about everything. Oh, and he also masturbates compulsively and maintains a robust fantasy life because he doesn’t know how to relate to the people he desires sexually.
This made it the single most relatable motion picture in film history as far as film critics are concerned. I felt like Kaufman was telling my story as well as his own but I also felt like he was telling the story of every writer.
Adaptation opens with neurotic, self-loathing narration that puts us deep inside Charlie Kaufman’s head, a wonderful and terrible place to be. Cage plays the reel version of perhaps our greatest and most original screenwriter as someone locked irrevocably in the prison of self, someone deeply uncomfortable in his own skin and utterly contemptuous of his mind and body.
The heat from Being John Malkovich makes him a hot writer but when he’s given the job of adapting The Orchid Thief Kaufman is utterly lost and overwhelmed, convinced that it will be his personal and professional ruin.
Kaufman’s Oscar-nominated script, which is credited to the non-existent Donald as well as its actual writer splits the action into parallel narratives that come together in the third act as the film shifts from neurotic comedy to seedy thriller.
In the other narrative, New Yorker writer Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep) finds the subject of a lifetime in John Laroche (Chris Cooper), a renegade horticulturalist (that old cliche) obsessed with finding and breeding a rare, mysterious plant known as a Ghost Orchid.
Susan is like a more gregarious, less neurotic version of Charlie Kaufman in being an intellectual stuck in her own head who longs to escape the prison of self and live gloriously and unashamedly in the moment like Donald Kaufman and John Laroche.
Adaptation makes inspired use of Streep’s ethereal beauty as well as the unmistakable air of detachment and distance she almost invariably brings to her roles, the sense that the artistry and artifice that she brings to her work keeps her from fully inhabiting her characters the way a rawer and less cerebral actor or actress might.
That works perfectly for her bittersweet, nuanced and ultimately unexpectedly salacious performance as a continental journalist who begins the film living the life of the mind and gets progressively more physical and debauched until she’s snorting mind-altering substances while having sex with a man with no front teeth in the swamp and trying to get our neurotic hero killed for knowing too much, lost in a world of sensation and irresistible urges.
That was initially Streep’s arc in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again but they felt it was both a little derivative and a little much.
Adaptation follows Charlie Kaufman as he tries to figure out how to adapt Orleans’ seemingly unadaptable book, break through his writer’s block and also muster up the courage to kiss pretty girls and Orleans as she delves deeper and deeper into the weird, intense world of her subject.
In an Oscar-winning performance, Cooper makes his oddball enthusiast a force of nature, the white-hot, fiery sun around which Orlean orbits. Where Susan Orlean and Charlie Kaufman are tentative and afraid, John Larouche is fearless, an iconoclast who goes from one all-consuming obsession to another, never looking back or wasting a moment in self-reflection.
Adaptation audaciously tells us exactly what it is going to do, story and theme-wise by virtue of an early monologue where Charlie angrily insists on all the things he refuses to do with his screenplay for The Orchid Thief and his work in general.
Adaptation ends up doing pretty much everything its lead character promises it won’t. It’s like a magician that tells you what he’s going to do and how he’s going to do it yet manages to wow audiences all the same.
Cage, Jonze and Kaufman manage to invest a world of real, aching emotion into a premise that on paper reads as impossibly ironic and arc. Adaptation is a film of real beauty and unexpected depth even as it moves from the mundane to the patently absurd.
Actors don’t get much more charismatic and confident than Cage but with the help of terrible posture, thinning hair and a deeply unflattering wardrobe Cage deftly plays someone timid and terrified of life, a sad sack with soulful eyes that convey the horror and irrevocable loneliness of existence.
Adaptation is a goddamn miracle of a movie that should have won Cage an Oscar for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor but he had to settle for the none too shabby consolation prize of his second richly deserved Oscar nomination for top lead.
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