Evolution Through Adaptation

(Note- Side Notes in the body of this piece contain spoilers)

Adaptation is it's own self fulfilling prophecy. It stresses over the concept of it's own making, rejects the concepts that would make it no more than dumb American trash, weaves three different films together and then employs those concepts anyway (poorly, of course, for comedic effect) as a way to make all of this work in an intelligent, engaging and fully involving way. It is also, above all, hilarious and thoroughly entertaining. At the end of the day, after all the stress, headaches, false starts and hair loss, it knows that it is both great cinematic art and still just a movie. It is, quite literally, the snake that eats it's own tail at least three times over. It is also, as far as American film goes, I think, nearly perfect.

So just what the heck do we make of all this information? Sometimes the best way to approach this big fragmented jumble of pieces is by laying them all out on the table. So we have three stories, in this chronological order:

1. Susan Orlean (a real reporter, played here by Meryl Streep) drives to Florida to do a report on an eccentric orchid poacher named John LaRoche (Chris Cooper) who is on trial for poaching endangered orchids out of the local swamp.

2. Orlean writes a best selling non-fiction book based on the response to the article called The Orchid Thief, which finds her exploring the idea of orchid collecting and ultimately finding interesting musings on the lines that divide passion and obsession through sad, beautiful prose.

3. The book is optioned to be made into a film. Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage), the mad genius screenwriter behind Being John Malchovich is given the job and, so the story goes, struggles so much with tying to figure out how to adapt this damn storyless book into a  narrative film that he ends up writing himself into his own screenplay.

And thus brings us to Adaptation, the finished film, a film about Charlie Kaufman desperately trying to adapt The Orchid Thief into cinema, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by the equally brilliant music video director Spike Jonze.

There are also two very important characters in the subtext of the Kaufman story. One is Charlie's twin brother Donald (also played by Cage) who, unlike the manic, paranoid, too-smart-for-his-own-good Charlie, is happy, free, liked by many but not too swift in the intelligence department. He's also decided, to add even more insult to injury, to became a screenwriter like his brother.

Side Note 1: Donald and Charlie represent the great writers battle between making great works and making popular ones. Alas, Jonze is very funny with the way he films Donald, looming behind Charlie and lit from below like a villain from a thriller. It's also fun to note the high canted angle, just moments prior, which sees Charlie looking into a mirror as Donald tells him he thinks he's going to put an imagine systems into his script and thinks it should be broken mirrors.

Side Note 2: Even deeper into the context of the film is the concept of Donald and Charlie's mother. It is implied constantly that Charlie rejects Donald's help as their mother favoured Donald and probably constantly told him he should be more like his brother. One gets the feeling that all Charlie needs to finish his script is the support of a good woman telling him he's doing a great job. It makes the phone call home at the end, probably years overdue, even more bittersweet. 

This leads them to Robert McKee (Brian Cox), a real life figure who does host regular screenwriting seminars where he will teach you, I suspect, not so much how to write a great story as how to properly structure a screenplay into three acts.

Let's break for a word on screenwriting. The rule is always Three. Three acts that each end with their own major plot point that shifts the story into the next act. What did Howard Hawks say when asked what a great movie is? "Three great scenes and no bad ones." Notice also how many stories we have already broken this film into, which also represents the three stages of adaptation itself.

From this advice Donald comes up with an idea for a benign to the point of hilarity horror script. What does he call it? The Three. See a pattern? Kaufman is poking fun at unimaginative screenwriters who make millions by churning out structured crap. Throughout the course of the film Kaufman so gleefully pokes fun at the conventions that are driving him insane but which without he could not finish his movie (thus explaining the ironic co-writer credit being given to Donald Kaufman in the film's opening credits)

Looks like Donald's script is going to be huge too. Charlie's agent thinks it will fetch him a pretty penny.Oh, and by the way Charlie, how's the Orchid movie coming? Even this man (played brilliantly by Ron Livingston), who has never seen a woman cross his path that he hasn't thought about fucking up the ass, tells the hard headed Charlie how to finish his damn script already, which of course, flies right over Kaufman's head.

The centrepiece of Adaptation is then the point when Charlie finally swallows his pride, listens to Donald and attends a McKee seminar. Charlie addresses McKee only to be scolded by the man, asking why the fuck he should waste his two hours on seeing his movie if it's not even going to be about anything? (It's also the funny moment he learns to stop using voice over).

This is the epiphany Charlie needs that leads towards the end of the movie in which the film abandons all connections to it's real world source material and creates a (rather shoddy) filmic narrative that brings all three stories together in a perfect dialectic (another principle of three).

Side-Note 3: When Charlie meets McKee after the seminar to ask for his help, his parting word on the final act is "And God help you if you use a deus ex machina." Now go watch that third act in the swamp again and get a good laugh. 

So what does it all mean? Well, quite literally, it's about exactly what it's title suggests. It is an adaptation. Actually it's three adaptations. It's also about the process of adaptation and, because adaptation is also a part of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, it's thus also, tied right back into real life.

It's about the three stages a story must evolve through along the path of adaptation and how/what changes about it each time. In the beginning John Laroche was a man, then his story was adapted into literature by Susan Orlean who recreated him based on her perceptions, which then became a movie in which Charlie Kaufman creates a story where they have an affair and become involved in a drug ring. Life needs stories, books need perspective and films need characters inside of stories where exciting things happen. That's evolution.

And that's also life. We meet people, change perspectives, realize our ways of doing things are not the best ones, become influenced by new people, places, pieces of information, etc. In the end, whether you like it or not, everything is Adaptation.

Justify Your Shitty Taste: Knowing

Here’s an interesting query: You’re running late for work and in one of those “doh” moments can’t find your keys, only to realize they are in your pocket. The whole ordeal only takes about thirty seconds out of your day but, while approaching a stop sign on the way a car appears out of nowhere and runs it. If you hadn’t had that momentary lapse, you very well could have been road kill.


Question is: was our losing the keys just a random hiccup of the brain or part of a preordained destiny? How easy it is to take for granted that stopping to tie a shoe, turning left instead of right, looking down instead of up, etc. could potentially be the difference between life of death. But whose terms do we really operate on, ours or the universes?

Think before deciding. If life is random than we simply go through the motions until our death and everything is meaningless, but if life is predetermined, free will is an extinct commodity, ultimately thwarting many religious and political debates as every suicide or abortion were already planned by a being greater than our human capacity could ever comprehend. If I’m writing this because it’s my destiny, then you’re reading it for the same reasons.

These are the things that entered my mind while watching Alex Proyas’ Knowing, which does something rare for this day and age: it manages to be both a stunning entertainment and unimaginably intelligent. It’s a rare science fiction film that doesn’t compromise its integrity by throwing it away to spectacle.

Knowing is a film that asks its audience to sit, watch, listen and, most importantly, pay attention while it spins its tale of destruction. So rare is it that a film stretches itself without apology to the very limits of its narrative possibilities (even if that means into the realms of the preposterous) these days that it is mistaken as bad filmmaking. Knowing is a film that, like all great science fiction, knows that art is a vehicle for raising questions, not giving them arbitrary answers.

Nicholas Cage stars as John Koestler, a professor of astrophysics who believes that the universe is comprised of a series of random events after his wife was killed while out of town when her hotel catches fire. John has a young son named Caleb who receives a mysterious paper covered in random numbers when a ceremony is held at his school to unlock a time capsule buried fifty years prior. The paper was written by the disturbed Lucinda Embry whose assignment for the capsule was to draw a picture of how she though the future would look.

What John slowly begins to realize after analyzing the paper is that the numbers form a code, predicting all of the disasters that will precede the end of the world. The numbers provide the date of the tragedy, the body count and the coordinates of the location. According to the code there are three disasters left before the world ends, all three of which, visually speaking, set a new standard in what special effects can achieve.

As John becomes obsessed with the code he desperately tries to track down the late Lucinda’s daughter for answers. Meanwhile, Caleb begins being visited by strange, darkly cloaked men whose constant whispers in his head also afflicted the young Lucinda and seem to be telling him something. Is Caleb a messenger for God or a victim of his own psyche?

Proyas, whose Dark City was also a (very different) masterpiece about the nature of human existence, takes what could have easily been a mindless entertainment (as the trailers make it out to be) or an absolute train wreck (as it would have been under original helmer Richard Kelly) and infuses it, not only with mind bending special effects, thrilling chases, and gripping storytelling, but with complex and intelligent images that are constantly contradictory to one another. At its heart Knowing is a constant battle between science and theology, the possible and the divine, the physical and the metaphysical, and so on. It, like The Dark Knight and Watchmen will be the central focus of many scholarly essays to come

The brilliance of the film, and arguably most of its suspense, lies in how it is never quite willing to tip the scales in favor of one side. I dare not even hint at the outcome of the story, which is next to impossible to predict, but to draw attention to how even the circumstances that govern it cannot simply be pegged down to that of the scientific or the Biblical. Can it be that one becomes real, or at least possible, in light of the other? Or will they constantly cancel each other’s integrity out: the Bible explaining everything that science can’t and science explaining everything the Bible can’t? What does that say about the nature of our existence? It may be easy to write the conclusion of this film off as improbable, but the debates it raises are real and, like all great science fiction, it believes in them down to the very last frame.

It’s truly rare these days to find a film whose vast intelligence is not confined to the insufficient demands of the running time, nor whose ideas are limited to the images on screen. A film whose musings slowly slip from the screen and out into the world because they are larger and more important than just getting a story from beginning to end. A film that is, to top it all off, one hell of a thrill ride. Yes, films like that are rare. Knowing is exactly one of them.

Revisiting The Wicker Man Remake (3.5 out of 5)

Considering the first paragraph of my review of Death at a Funeral, I thought I'd look back at a review I wrote for Neil Labute's remake of The Wicker Man a couple years ago.

The Wicker Man is not a very good film, but it’s an interesting experience. It is not engaging, not scary and not even all that entertaining or likable, however I’m giving it three and a half stars which, in some small way, translates into a recommendation. I recommend it because, as big a mess as it is, it’s also dark, angry, cynical and, pessimistic; a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Hollywood has been playing it safe for so many years that it’s kind of uncanny that anyone would have the nerve to make this at all.

That anyone is Neil Labute who, outside of Todd Solandz, is probably the most unrelenting member of the new group of “auteur” filmmakers to emerge from the independent world in the 90’s. However, like many filmmakers before and after, Labute operates under a system that Solandz has thus far been able to escape: the “one for us, one for them” archetype. Thus, filmmakers make a film that the studios can sell, then giving them the freedom to then make the one that’s dear to their hearts. It can’t be stated as fact, but I have a sinking suspicion that if it were not for this system, Labute would not even be interested in poor remakes of cult horror films. However, to view the Wicker Man as the product of its specific maker, we begin to understand why Labute would be drawn to it.

When we first meet the cop Edward Malus (Nicholas Cage) he is involved in an arbitrary scene in which, after pulling over a mother and her daughter whose doll has blown out of the luggage strapped to the top of their car, the car is struck by a transport truck, trapping the two inside as they burn to death.

Miraculously unharmed, Edward, on his time off, receives a letter from a former fiancée who left him at the alter and is now living on a private remote island called Summersisle with her daughter who has gone missing. The letter asks Edward if he could journey to the island and help find her.

On the island Edward is not exactly welcomed. He is greeted by three women who hassle him, asking how he got there in the first place as you must be invited to enter. As Edward begins his search for the missing child he discovers that the island is run by a mysterious figure know as Sister Summersisle (Ellen Burstyn), that men seem to be voiceless slaves and the possibly murderous women talk to Edward in that exasperating way people talk when they are never telling quite as much as they know.

The plot thickens as Edward discovers that the little girl may be his own child and may have been kidnapped by the cultish inhabitants of Summersisle in order to sacrifice her so that the coming year produces a good honey crop (Summersisle is a bee keeping colony after all). I doubt that I would be giving much away if I tell you that nothing is as it seems.

Watching the Wicker Man we get the sinking feeling that it is simply playing by the numbers: the opening sequences spin the wheels of a plot that Labute never fully seems to be engaged in. Instead we discern that he is using the film as a backdrop in which to deal with the fears and anxieties that he so brutally and hilariously tried to repress back in his 1997 debut film In the Company of Men. That film centered on a corporate slime ball named Chad who, feeling threatened by the inclusion of women into the office world, makes a bet with his friend to become romantically engaged with one and then crush her when she least expects it.

In the time that has passed since, we have seen the equality of women in the work force rise and the uncrowning of men as rulers of the working world. The Wicker Man shows us the next logical social progression: a society that has been taken over by women who have created their own laws to govern their own ways of life and are ultimately vengeful towards the men who have repressed them for all these years. Notice how the only man of power on Summersisle is Edward because he is a working professional: a police officer with a badge and a gun, constantly threatening to arrest the women for misbehavior under a law created by men to govern a man’s world. If In the Company of Men was an attack on the shallowness of corporate men in a dog eat dog world, The Wicker Man serves as a counter attack against feminism in a sexually liberated social setting. These women are like Chad in reverse.

What else is interesting is that Edward is allergic to bees. If we trace the bee’s mythology we understand that they were seen as feminine creatures. Homer in his work also thought of bees as wild, untamed creatures. The list of comparisons is endless. It might not be a stretch to believe that this is how Labute perceives militant feminists: as wild and untamed creatures that are willing to sacrifice any man for the betterment of themselves. It seems no small irony that the one man on Summersisle who has the ability to overpower the women is also fatally allergic to bee stings.

The problem is that if Labute’s metaphor makes sense, his film doesn’t. It seems to be operating under the framework of the 1973 Wicker Man, but the plot never becomes more than this; as if Lebute is just spinning the wheels while his interests lay elsewhere. The car crash scene at the beginning seems without purpose, even worse is Edward’s constant flashbacks to it. Characters appear and we don’t know who they are, Cage runs around the island yelling at women, and an ending ritual in which the inhabitants of the island dress up in animal costumes is so strange that we can never quite grasp whether or not Labute is making a horror film or a strange comedy.

The truth is that a lot of people who see the Wicker Man will hate it; it is sloppy, convoluted, and confusing. Yet to not see it might be a shame as it unflinchingly goes for the throat when most horror films seem to be stuck on autopilot. I’d rather a film fail interestingly than succeed without inspiration. I therefore could have hated the film too, but I wasn’t satisfied: why would a great filmmaker reduce himself to a by-the-numbers picture? I’m reminded of a quote from Labute’s great 2003 film The Shape of Things in which a character states that Picasso didn’t take a shit and call it art. He knew the difference and that’s what made him Picasso. I think Neil Labute knows the difference too.