ADAPTATION ****
DIRECTED BY Spike Jonze
STARRING Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper
US 2002 115 mins.
DOWN WITH LOVE ***1/2
DIRECTED BY Peyton Reed
STARRING Ewan McGregor, Renée Zellweger, David Hyde Pierce
US 2003 101 mins.
THE GOOD THIEF ****
DIRECTED BY Neil Jordan
STARRING Nick Nolte, Tchéky Karyo, Nutsa Kukhianidze, Ralph Fiennes
UK / France 2002 108 mins.
By Preston Wilder
AH, TO BE a film reviewer in Cyprus. I love my job but sometimes I feel like Jodie Foster in Contact, interpreting alien signals from another planet as people cluster round me going, ‘What does it mean?’ The world – so we’re told – is all but globalised, yet there’s still a chasm between films and local audiences.
Take Adaptation. This was one of the most acclaimed films of 2002, winning an Oscar for Chris Cooper and nominations for Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep; yet, despite its pedigree, it’s only now playing in Cyprus, and wouldn’t be here at all had the Friends of the Cinema Society not grasped the nettle. You can see why the ‘proper’ cinemas passed on this ingenious meta-comedy. As a film, it’s terrific (if flawed); yet it’s also likely to provoke more bafflement than mirth in casual viewers, i.e. those unfamiliar with the inner workings of Hollywood and/or the twisted mind of writer Charlie Kaufman.
The bafflement begins with the opening scene: after white-on-black credits punctuated by a neurotic stream-of-consciousness monologue (ironically starting with “Do I have an original thought in my head?”), we see documentary footage allegedly taken “on the set of Being John Malkovich”. Some viewers may wonder what Being John Malkovich is, seeing as it came and went in the twinkling of an eye back in ’99 (it was in fact the first collaboration between Kaufman and director Spike Jonze). Others may wonder why John Malkovich is wearing a dress, and how they managed to get this footage (answer: they didn’t, it’s fake), and whether film sets are really such unfriendly places. In fact, the whole two-minute scene is a clever joke on the ‘Making Of’ phenomenon that’s inundated us with behind-the-scenes peeks; it also introduces our hero, namely Charlie Kaufman.
Mr Kaufman is the writer of Adaptation as well as its lead character, though the real and movie Kaufmans aren’t necessarily the same – at least I hope not, given that the onscreen Charlie is a bit of a loser. He’s balding, and wears flannel shirts over his pants to hide his paunch; he sweats a lot, and is socially awkward. Then again, he also looks like Nicolas Cage – who puts bad memories of Captain Corelli behind him to remind us what a great comic actor he used to be. The movie Charlie has a twin screenwriter brother named Donald (Cage again), which the real Charlie does not – though the credits do assert that the film was written by “Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman”, and imaginary Donald duly got a real-life Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. It’s that kind of movie.
Adaptation really ought to be a book, so it could come with footnotes. Charlie is a serious-minded artist, but Donald is a cheerful hack writing a serial-killer script where all the characters turn out to be figments of the killer’s imagination – which is not only a great joke on Hollywood’s obsession with twist endings, but also the plot of the recent Identity (I assume Kaufman heard about it at some Tinseltown party and decided to put it in; it’s just too perfect to be coincidence). Donald is obsessed with screenwriting guru Robert McKee, who reduces scripts to a set of rules and delivers “Commandments” like “The last act makes a movie”; McKee is in fact a real person – though played with gusto by Brian Cox – and a frequent scapegoat for critics lamenting Hollywood’s reliance on formula.
Will Adaptation work for those who’ve never heard of McKee, or know nothing of screenwriters’ problems, or don’t see the hilarity in Charlie-the-Artist’s pained response to Donald’s prattling about “the industry” (“Don’t say ‘industry’¼”)? There’s a danger the inside-jokes will get the film dismissed as ‘too Hollywood’ when in fact it’s trying to be the exact opposite. Yet there’s also undoubted pleasures here – not least because the esoteric stuff gets cross-cut with the book Charlie’s supposed to be adapting, The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean (who’s also a real person, but played by Meryl Streep), chronicling her romance with a roguish, maverick naturalist. Chris Cooper is delightful in the role, his sly real-person charm contrasting beautifully with the script’s (deliberate) self-indulgence.
Indeed, Adaptation’s problems finally stem not from too much esoterica but a more basic, McKee-ish flaw. “The last act makes a movie,” he Commands, and the last act almost sinks this one, despite (or because of) its ambition. The title is a pun, ‘adaptation’ being the process of adapting a book but also the process of adapting to a System (in this case, Hollywood); the final third of Adaptation is supposed to meld the opposing styles of Charlie and Donald, creating a synthesis – represented in the dial-tone scene between Streep and Cooper, which acts as a cheeky ‘image system’ – and making the point that adaptation involves precisely this half-way approach.
Alas, director Jonze – whose biggest talent seems to be that he never met a weird idea he didn’t like – isn’t up to it. The final third should feel texturally different to the rest of it (new, punchier rhythms, maybe a glossier style or blast of adrenalin), but it hews to the same rather gritty look and rather shaggy rhythm. The film is in the end too academic, and a little unsatisfying, yet it’s very much worth watching – and really very funny, especially if you follow the inner workings of ‘the industry’. And even if you don’t.
Of course, the real problem in Cyprus is we have no sense of film history – not a fault, simply a fact, when it’s so difficult even to get hold of older movies. It’s true the occasional Doris Day / Rock Hudson comedy turns up on CyBC, but it’s still a good bet most of the multiplex audience will go to Down With Love with little understanding of what it’s trying to do. Why does it use split-screen so extensively? Why the jaunty score and innuendo-laden dialogue? Why does everything look so pink?
The answer, of course, is that this is how they did things, romantic-comedy-wise, in the early 60s – which is also when the film is set, with small-town girl Renée Zellweger coming to the city to plug her book Down With Love, a tome calling on women to act the way men do, put romantic notions aside and liberate themselves at home and in the workplace.
This is a time when boardrooms are male preserves, full of pipe-smoking executives with initials for names calling each other ‘JT’ and ‘CW’ (another joke that’s likely to go over the heads of younger viewers). Outside the office, women are fodder for Lotharios like “ladies’ man, man’s man and man-about-town” Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor), a star reporter who gets snubbed by Renée – and, when her book becomes a sensation, determines to get even by making her fall in love with him, posing as a guileless astronaut (echoing the 1959 Pillow Talk, where Rock Hudson disguised himself as a Texas oilman). The film coasts along on a kitsch whirlwind of pastel colours, double entendres and lots of fluid wordplay (the word “waylaid” gets predictably milked), plus David Hyde Pierce – Niles in Frasier – in the old Tony Randall role.
There’s not a great deal to say about Down With Love. If you don’t know what it’s parodying, I suspect you’ll be puzzled. If you do, you’ll know it does very well, let down only by Zellweger’s too-knowing performance – smothering her character in a battery of moues, winks and breathy ooh-la-las – and a disastrous twist near t
he end, exactly the kind that gets spoofed in Adaptation (if ever a film didn’t need that kind of pull-the-rug-from-under trickery¼). It’s just sad that a fun little movie like this should be limited in its audience, when something as crude and cynical as American Pie 3 is not. But what can you do?
Fortunately, a Ph.D in Cinephilia isn’t always necessary in order to appreciate a good movie – though it certainly helps. I’ll be away next week (at the Salonica Film Festival), and The Good Thief will probably be gone by the time I get back, hence this quick mention for a film whose very presence at the multiplex is a pleasant surprise. This is another case of a chasm between film and audience, being a remake of the 50s French crime drama Bob Le Flambeur; fortunately, Neil Jordan’s lyrical heist movie knows that not many punters will have seen the original – and prefers to entertain on its own terms.
Good Thief changes Bob beyond recognition but it does preserve the 1955 film’s spirit, which is to go for pure style – only replacing bittersweet Parisian ambience with candy-coloured zest and extravagant high spirits. Nick Nolte is the Good Thief, a wasted American heading a multi-cultural band of robbers in the South of France (their plan? to rob the casino at Monte Carlo on the night of the Grand Prix). Things go wrong, of course, but the film is mostly notable for its style and images, its eclectic soundtrack – going from French hip-hop to Leonard Cohen – frequent jump-cuts and delectable visuals with tinges of slo-mo.
It’s also notable for Nolte, bringing his welcome bulk and melancholy gravitas, though in truth The Good Thief is emotionally thin – too much of what it calls “mathematics”, not enough out-and-out feeling. It’s a playful, charming piece, tending to garrulous dialogue and a casual finesse. Like Adaptation and Down With Love it may not be for all tastes – but you don’t need any special knowledge to smile with pleasure at a cheesy French version of ‘Black is Black’, or a luscious magic-hour shot of Monte with all its lights gleaming. All you need are your eyes, and ears.
