Tim-230 के द्वारा समीक्षा

I enjoyed this film. I enjoyed its originality of execution, as well as its thematic obsession with originality itself. I also enjoyed the performances. But one thing that bothered me, and no one else seems to have noticed, is its resemblance to Sam Shepherd's "True West," the 1980 stage play, turned into a 1984 TV production starring Gary Sinise and, ironically, John Malkovich who also appears briefly in this film (though, in a sense, in his own eponymous film, of which he weirdly plays the director).

In both "Adaptation" and "True West" the story line involves two brothers, the first a successful screen writer embarked on a new project but now suffering from a debilitating case of writer's block, and the second, recently arrived for a stay with the first, who eventually begins working on a screenplay of his own, finishing it with the grudging help of his brother.

Even though the second brother's script sounds ridiculous and hackneyed to our ears and to those of the first brother, it is generously praised by a third party who represents the film industry's ignorant bureaucracy (the producer in "True West," the young studio boss in "Adaptation"), who both suggest that the second, greenhorn brother should now help the first. In both films the second brother becomes a kind of "doppelganger" of the first, a Mr. Hyde to the latter's Dr. Jekyll, and so it is not difficult to view these men as two sides of the same personality, which in "Adaptation" is one of the plot devices of second-brother Donald's script. All the major characters are in essence the same person because, although they may exist in the larger reality, they are all constructions (and reductions) of the author, including "Charlie" himself. And so we are to conclude that all writing is autobiographical (as much as we try to make it something else, something more), and the act of story-telling (i.e., movie-making) becomes a solipsistic enterprise shrinking the world into something that reflects nothing more than one's own neurotic self.

In neither film does it come as a surprise that reality begins to parody the written script, which has never been anything more than an insufficiently digested version of a richer, more elusive Reality (like the rare ghost orchid). This is underscored in "Adaptation" when the story ends so artificially and so happily, in all its Hollywoodian glory, contrary to all the all the events and all the agony that have led to it, including the ruination of the career of a fictionalized Susan Orlean and the deaths of both a fictionalized Donald and a fictionalized Laroche, the orchid man. Laroche is attacked by an alligator at just the right moment, a "deus ex machina" if there ever was one; and this, of course, is a slap in the face of the tormented ex-screenwriter McKee, but it is also a vindication of him because it helps us see how Charlie has sold out to the "formula." We notice this also in Valerie and Charlie's mutual confession of love, tidy and cute from a screenwriter's perspective, but too unbelievably pat from ours. These incidents can only make sense if we view all the trashed and co-opted characters as shriveled parts of Charlie's personality, whom he will now conveniently dispense with, just as Donald might have done, in order to get on with his comfortable career. In "True West," Austin, the bother who is equivalent to Charlie in "Adaptation," at one point laments, "There's nothin' real down here! Least of all me!" --an understandable observation when, although neither nature nor the human personality operates according to uniformly predictable laws, the characters in a Hollywood movie sometimes do. Charlie Kaufman could just as well have said this. But, in attempting to control the uncontrollable by putting himself in his own story, the "Charlie" he lets us see becomes as phony as everything else.

Like "Being John Malkovich," this is a movie that made me think -- maybe even more than "True West" did. I just wonder, though, whether Shepherd shouldn't sue for plagiarism.