adaptation

I have something of a blind-spot for the word adaptation. To me, the word should be "adaption".

I don't know why I think this - the proper word makes sense and everything, it's just, I dunno, it seems like it's got too many syllables.

(According to a google search I've just done, adaption is a word and is also another word for adaptation - this is weird, because I've never seen it used and the spell checker corrects it to adaptation.)

Anyway, the film is written by Charlie Kaufman, who is, simply put, one of the best screen-writers ever. Kaufman was responsible for Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which are two of my favourite films.

This is a really hard review to write, because the film is really complex. Or at least, it's complex when you really start to look at it - on the surface it's relatively straight-forward.

The straight-forward version is the story of Charlie Kaufman trying to adapt a book called the Orchid Thief. This is a real-life, non-fiction book, written by a real person about a guy called John Laroche who wanted to clone a very rare orchid that grows in the Florida swamps.

However, the film is a blend of this non-fiction narrative with a fictional one. Which is where it gets complicated. Basically, the film is about the process of adaptation that Charlie Kaufman goes through in adapting what he comes to realise is an un-adaptable book.

The book it seems is a real life account and doesn't have a proper narrative thread. And yet the nature of mainstream movie making is that it's all about narrative. There's a brilliant part close to the beginning where Kaufman is basically in a lunch meeting, telling the person he's doing the adaptation about all the things he doesn't want to put in the movie because he wants it to be about "real life" and real life isn't like that.

And yet as the problem of adapting the un-adaptable rears its head, Kaufman transitions into that very story he didn't want to write. But the way this is done is so clever you don't really realise what's going on.

What makes it even more interesting is that it's not clear if Kaufman is being really disparaging about such writing or whether in a way he's admitting that in the end he's unable to transcend it. Effectively, he's asking the question, rather than giving the answer.

So we have a very weird mix of a film - real events are mixed with fictional ones and the plot twists around, looping back on itself in a complex way.