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Why Do I Do This?
Writing movie reviews is fucking hard, especially when you're
not getting paid for it. And besides, who the hell do I think
I am? These people bare their souls for their art, and all
I do is tear it down for my own mastabatory amusement. Which
I don't, really, now that I think about it: A hundred people
may nod their heads voraciously at my contention that FDR
rising from his wheelchair is a "crime against American
history," but that doesn't stop Pearl Harbor from
occupying a week in high school social studies classes all
across the United States. So what's the fucking point of writing
movie reviews, anyway? Just to prove how smart I am? To justify
all that money I spend going to the movies, since it's pretty
apparent I have no other life anyway? No, there's got to be
more to it than that. I know I don't do this to impress my
girlfriend, who to my knowledge, has never read a single one
of my reviews. Do I think I'm some sort of Anthony Lane in
training? He's prick, but he's a professional prick who gets
paid to be a prick. I mean really, could Anthony Lane put
all those clever captions with these pictures? Well, yes,
he probably could, and much better ones too—but he doesn't
have to, since he has a real job reviewing movies and I'm
just trying to placate my own dissatisfaction with my life
by hyperbolizing my movie reviewing credentials to my friends
because they'll never know the difference anyway.
Anthony Lane's reviews are good, in that sprawling, smarty-pants,
wise-ass New Yorker kind of way. I could never, ever
write anything like "The Scarlet Letter is 'freely
adapted' from the work by Nathaniel Hawthorne in the same
way methane is freely adapted from cows." Other critics
misunderstand, or are jealous of, Anthony Lane, that he uses
humor as a hook precisely to identify the obvious structural
flaws of Hollywood movies, which sets himself up for larger
contextual ideas in his conclusion. By layering his writing
with self-reflexive irony, he both embraces and decries Hollywood
movies without sounding like a shill or a crank. Me, I don't
have that sort of self-awareness, or skill, so I just sound
like a hyperbolic hack. No wonder I don't have a job at The
New Yorker, or, for that matter, the sort of readership
MaryAnn Johanson does. Walking out of the theater after Adaptation,
I told JimmyO (we're often accused of being the same person,
or even brothers, which isn't true) that I had this really
neat idea to review Adaptation as a reviewer trying
to review Adaptation. He said, "Nice try, dumbass.
MaryAnn Johanson beat you to it. I'm just going to say that
we no longer have to call him 'former' actor Nicolas Cage
and be done with it. Do you think anyone realizes we steal
half our jokes from The Film Geek?" Fuck JimmyO: He just
reviews movies because he says it's "fun to make fun
of stuff."
Shit, what am I going to do now? My big idea to finally get
me out of this writer's block I've had since Solaris, because
I can't seem to mince reviews down to their marrow because
I have all of these grand ideas for reviews that are way too
ambitious, and thus, fucking pointless, for Hollywood movies
(Really, who the fuck wants to read a review of The Two
Towers using Tolkien's own ideas on mythology to discuss
Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings?)
that don't deserve this kind of overwrought, pseudo-intellectual
thought anyway, has already been done by reviewer who is far
better and has far more readers than I do. When Anthony Lane
dies in fifty years, why would anyone at The New Yorker
read my resume if Time Magazine hasn't said my
reviews are "Snarky, well-informed commentary in a breezy
style", like they did for MaryAnn Johanson? Am I well-informed?
Yes, probably too well-informed (there I go again with the
peacock pseudo-intellectualism). Is my style "breezy"?
No, gawd no. About as breezy as an Al Gore stump speech. Am
I...snarky? Do I even know what "snarky" means?
Ok, well, I'm going to try to up the snark by about twenty
percent, while being well-informed, all in a breezy style.
Even I know this is going to be a complete failure. Adaptation
is the story of writer Charlie Kaufman, the real-life
writer of the movie itself. He has been assigned to adapt
Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, a plotless meditation
on a man's obsession with finding the holy grail of botany,
the rare "Ghost Orchid." The film presents itself
as metafiction, in which we see Kaufman's struggles with himself
(and his twin brother Donald, who just wants to get laid and
sell a script to Hollywood) parallel with Susan Orlean's struggle
with writing her book. In the end, we see that this "Orlean"
is merely Kaufman's attempt to make a story out of Orlean
writing the book, as he himself struggles with understanding
her "intent" as he tries to adapt her work. The
conflict is, especially for a man with the reputation of Being
John Malkovich hanging over him, how can one be both faithful
and original?
This comes back to the modernism/post-modernism issue in
literature. Essentially, Charlie's twin brother Donald embodies
modernism, that storytelling adheres to a set of conventions
within a mode, or in the movies, a genre. Donald embraces
a screenwriting seminar in which he learns the "rules,"
which, of course, Charlie abhors. Strict genre films, which
constitute the majority of Hollywood films, abide by the modernist
doctrine of a formulaic whole that celebrates passion and
will rather than reason. This intuitive approach employs many
Jungian theories, which is also convenient for modernistic
genres, for it provides a ready set of symbols and images
to be plugged into standard archetypes. For me, modernism
has always been a conundrum: Modernist writing works fiercely
to systematically align plot and image patterns to reject
systematic morality. Take any Jerry Bruckheimer film, for
instance: One can faithfully predict the plot of Top Gun
or The Rock, yet the hero always chooses unconventional
means—the story plays by the rules to show the heroism
of breaking the rules.
For the modernist stage director, the task is to translate
the script faithfully from the screenwriter's intent,
and so it is with the movies. Essentially, Kaufman, as post-modernly
rebellious and self-reflexive as they come, struggles with
being faithful to a greatly admired book while staying true
to his post-modernist rejection of convention. Kaufman's desire
"not to screw it up" assumes modernist apriori intent,
which is completely counter-intuitive to his instincts as
a writer. So his struggle with the impossible and irrelevant
task of finding a portal inside Susan Orlean's head becomes
the human drama of sexual frustration and inadequacy.
This is the bulk of the first two acts of the movie. Charlie's
search for meaning in orchids (which, incidentally, comes
from the Latin for "testicle") manifests itself
in a painfully unrequited romance with Amelia (Cara Seymour),
then taking on more bizarre proportions as he masturbates
to a jacket sleeve photograph of Orlean (Meryl Streep), all
the while hounded by mysteriously confident Donald, who scores
with the make-up girl on Being John Malkovich. Donald
may be the dorkiest Tyler Durden figure in movies, and he
embodies my two major objections to Fight Club, as
pointed out by Charlie: The multiple-personality device is
far overused and the story has to make sense backward as well
as forward. Anyway, Kaufman (the writer, not the character)
makes something of Orlean's relationship with the Orchid Thief
himself, John Laroche (Chris Cooper). Orlean's marriage to
Curtis Hanson (!) is one of the passionless, high-society
variety, and she's genuinely moved by Laroche's musings on
pollination and love making, how it's nature's way that we
form ourselves selflessly to propagate the species, that falling
in love is nature's way, and the human condition is defined
by attachment to the objects we make love to, which doesn't
consume bees when they pollinate orchids. Laroche offers the
best mission statement for movie adaptations: "Whittle
it down to one thing, one thing you're really passionate about."
This is all really something, some of it rather moving, until
the movie knowingly doesn't know how to end. I say knowingly
because, well, I have the suspicion that this was planned
at the outset. Kaufman turns the third act into a hyper-contrived
Hollywood finish, complete with guns blazin' and drug snortin'
and earnest speeches about mom. By giving up on his movie
and settling for the clichéd finish, Kaufman wishes
to show that a writer can't possibly "get inside the
head" of another writer and adapt faithfully, and to
do so results in derivative. All adaptations are original
works because of the post-modern idea that there is no single
correct interpretation of a text, and besides, once the work
is out there, the artist becomes irrelevant (just watch Kaufman
being pushed around on the "set" of Being John
Malkovich)
Well, that's my review. Oh yes, I forgot to say that this
is Nicolas Cage's best role since Leaving Las Vegas
and that I liked it a whole lot. This is also the part when
I'm supposed to say something snarky, like The Flick Filosopher,
or funny, like Anthony Lane, but all that pseudo-academic
rambling has pretty much whittled my resolve to just getting
this thing finished. I guess I could end by saying that I
think I get a lot of what Charlie Kaufman is trying to say
about the struggle of the self-conscious writer. I sit here
and try to crank out these movie reviews, and I know I'm pretty
good at it—good enough to be paid for it. But I just
can't write the sort of reviews that newspapers and magazines
would pay someone to write. Often, I wait to read the reviews
of a movie specifically so that I can write something completely
different than what's already been done. That's no way to
write for consumption, not to mention meet a deadline, and
if I'm going to invest all this time and effort, then what's
the point? So that all seven thousand of you who read filmsnobs.com
every month can have ten minutes of possible enjoyment in
your day? That's why I read Tolkien's essays on Beowulf
and his theories of myth, so that I can spend an entire day
cranking out a review that will take you ten minutes to read
(even though most of you just look at the pictures) when I
could be taking my girlfriend ice skating or catching up on
those papers I need to grade? And besides, who the hell do
I think I am that I know that Charlie Kaufman intends
the third act to be ironic. He's trusting the audience to
read his mind, when he already admits that artistic intent
is beside the point! Fuck it. There's no reason for me to
do this anymore. I'll concur with Roeper and JimmyO and give
Adaptation a thumbs-up.
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