ADAPTATION (2003)

 
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 26, 2011 2:15 pm    Post subject: ADAPTATION (2003) Reply with quote

This movie didn’t get through to me at all. I couldn’t grasp what it was trying to do unless it was trying to make up a goofy story to add pizazz to a fictionalization of The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, which was a serious account of a man in Florida obsessed with finding very rare orchids. As I recall her account, there was no tie-in with drugs, and the author did not hop into bed with the orchid thief, John Laroche.

But a movie has to have excitement, and so they jazzed it up by having Orlean snorting some drug derived from the orchids and going all nutty over Laroche. The plot centers around the twins Don and Charlie Kaufman because Charlie is trying to write the screen play.

The story is put together in such a way that we’re never sure how much of it is Charlie’s imagination and how much of it is meant to be real for the purposes of the movie.

I was left wondering how Susan Orlean could have allowed this movie to be made, but in 2003 she told USA Today: “The general public? Let’s hope they get it. And if they don’t, they won’t think I’m a real person. Or they’ll just think I’m wild. And in the general scheme of things, I’d rather be perceived as wild than boring.”

They won’t think she’s a real person? When the movie is careful to show the magazine she wrote the piece for the New Yorker, and nothing has been changed–not her name, not her book title, not the details presented in the book–except for adding quite a few smarmy touches that weren’t there in the first place?

Yes, things could have happened in the way shown in this movie. But the fact is that they didn’t. Was Susan Orlean so eager to help along her book sales that she consented to let herself be represented as far less capable than she really is?

For this movie is basically a story of a somewhat pathetic intellectual woman who goes all ditzy for a guy who talks a good line and is entirely too impressed with himself. It comes perilously close to bawdy jokes that make fun of professional women who have always had an uphill battle just to have their work taken seriously.

They don’t need this Meryl Streep representation pulling them down.

And Orlean’s point was that there are obsessive persons who pursue something like a ghost orchid mainly because it is beautiful and rare. Adding drugs to the picture makes Laroche’s pursuit of the ghost orchid a completely different sort of quest.
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