That would suggest that the “real” Donald Kaufman didn’t “actually” die, because none of the sex/drugs/violence really happened. Sorry, I don’t buy it.
I don’t have any problem with the ending. Why must Real-Life Charlie Kaufman be bound to the same standards as Movie Charlie Kaufman? Is it such a betrayal for Real-Life Charlie to write an ending that Movie Charlie would decry as hack-work? (Except when Movie Charlie includes the sex/drugs/violence as factual reporting from first-hand experience.)
How do we know that the movie we all saw – Adaptation – was in fact produced from the script written by Movie Charlie?
And has there been a novelization yet? Does the novelizer inject himself into the plot, agonizing over how he’ll ever adapt such a loony screenplay into book form?
Even if the end of the film was written by Donald, in the REAL ‘real life’ doesn’t anyone think that the two main characters in the book, (that were SUPPOSED to be the main character in the movie), got the shit end of this deal?
Susan Orlean wants to kill Kaufman, and John Laroache kills his (fictionalize) brother (by mistake, but they were out there with the intent to kill). Then when Laroache is killed by the alligator, Orlean calls him a “fat shit” and a bunch of other abusive shit. Even if that was a ‘joke’, not a lot of people will understand it as one. Hell, people on this thread can’t say for a fact that this was all the work of Donald, and not his brother. They are made out to look like murderous druggies. I’m not saying that people will see this and think it’s all base on true events, (some might… stupid people who thought the Blaire Witch was real footage, and for some reason thought people would charge other people money to see teenagers get killed for real). It’s just that I didn’t think these two got a good deal overal.
A flower making an adaptation to live in an hostile environment?
A person adapting himself to his world?
What is this movie about? Is it about flowers? Is it about the process of making a Hollywood product?
Some people think nothing happens till the “Hollywood” part. But what of Chris Coopers character. He has many life changing events happen to him. Think of that car crash. Think of the way the NY writers clique made fun of his missing teeth. The movie dosent give the REAL guy a raw deal the original BOOK does. The author dosen’t respect him but as she goes from observer of him to actually participating in life with him she changes. Charlie observes life but he does not participate. His brother does.
He thinks his brother is an idiot but when he listens to him he learns about life and love.
You aren’t who loves you. You are who you love. My love for that girl was mine. Even she couldn’t take it from me.
Just as Merly Streep was changed writing her book. Charlie was changed writing the screenplay. An artist may try to just record what is there but the artist is changed by the subject.
Charlie changes in the film. He learns life lessons. He overcomes obstacales. He didn’t do these things at the start of the film. He wouldn’t even talk to the make-up girl on the set. He adapts to world.
I viewed the ending of the film as Charlie Kaufman (the real one, not the movie one) purging himself of all his ‘hack’ urges, sort of a spiritual clensing. Look at it like this: he creates a fictional twin brother who represents his id and takes the easy way out of everything. He then has him take over his script and then kills him off in it. It’s a way of giving into those shortcuts but in a clever way, poking fun at them.
It reminded me of a Steven Soderbergh movie, Schizopolis, but with a plot. (not that Schizopolis suffers for being plotless). It’s the same kind of introspective yet grand scale, masturbatory (in both the figurative and literal sense of the word) peering into of the artist’s brain.
MyFootZZZ: Yes, the movie versions of the Orchid Thief characrters get the shaft in ways they do not deserve. Charlie attempted to do something pure and simple about real life, flowers, and the people who loved them. He failed miserably, and ended up with an amalgam of cliches and self-absorbed belly gazing. So the self-congratulatory narration at the end nonwithstanding, ADAPTATION is the story of artistic failure. (Though, as Donald would surely point out, artistic failure isn’t so horrible.)
Raygun99 brings up something few people have noticed: Donald isn’t “real,” just another part of Charlie’s personality. Sure, within the fictional world of the movie ADAPTATION, Donald is real–he talks to people, has a girlfriend, etc. But at a higher levle he’s just a symbolic representation of the more outgoing, conformist part of Kaufman’s personality.
The clue for this comes when Donald is describing his muliple-personality killer gimmick to Charlie. Charlie protests, saying “You don’t understand. The cop and the killer are the same person. How would you shoot them?” Donald replies, “With trick photography.”
We laugh, thinking Donald has missed the point. But in fact Kaufman does exactly what Donald says–he shows us two sides of the same personality simultaneously by using the simple trick of making anguished, artistic Charlie and outgoing, conventional Donald identical twins. And of course trick photography is used to create the illusion of identical twins on screen …
TheeGrumpy: We know ADAPTATION is the product of Movie Charlie because the credits claim the screenplay is by Charlie and Donald Kaufman. Needless to say, in real life, there is no such person as Donald Kaufman.
I got the ending in about 5 minutes of that ridiculous swamp/killer/Hollywood parodic stuff, but it dragged on for about 30.
There’s a very funny discussion over on IMDB about Donald K.
If you click on his name (under “writing credits”) there’s this angry messageboard cretin complaining that there IS no Donald Kaufman, and others arguing and responding to the point. It’s pretty amusing. http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0442134/board/nest/465820
I understand the move Charlie made at the end of the film, and it is brilliant in it’s own right.
It’s just that Orlean and Laroache get the shit-end of this deal. For the sole reason that most people I know wouldn’t ‘get’ the ending. Especially if they haven’t seen ’Being John Malkovich’, and didn‘t know what a crackpot Kaufman can be. Even intelligent and creative people might not be in on the joke. To them, these two real life people are demonized, and that kind of sucks for Orlean and Laroache. They were initially going to be, not only the main focus of the movie, but portrayed as flawed, yet good people.
Kaufman made the movie all about himself. Sure these folks are making money off of this movie either way, and I’m sure it won’t hurt the book sales. Hell, I’m sure they’re ok with the movie. I’m just saying that, considering what they had probably originally signed on to, it sort of sucks.
However, this is ALL speculation. For all any of us know, this could have been the original plan to begin with. It’s interesting that Charlie creates a fictional character to execute the ending. If this, was in fact, the plan from the very beginning, then it’s even more of a brilliant move. Sort of like focusing the blame of the ‘typical Hollywood ending’ on someone who doesn’t exist in the first place and dies at the end of the movie.
So I have no real bases for an objection. I’m just saying that if the movie, up until the end, is relatively true (Charlie originally set to make a movie about the book, and not a movie about him making a movie about him making a movie about the book) … Kaufman was sort of selfish. Perhaps that’s the price that has to be paid for a creative film to come out every once in a while.
You have to ask yourself if Charlie would even be considered for this type of job. Maybe most of you have already figured this out, and I’m just slow, but I’m pretty sure the movie wasn’t meant to be all about the book in the first place. Donald doesn’t only play the role of Charlie’s ‘id‘. I think he’s also an excuse for the ending. It would be ingenious if Charlie ‘created’ Donald at the start of his brain storming, and not just to get himself out of a ‘jam’.
I thought that the movie was weak from beginning to end.
Actually, to be fair, I thought that the first two thirds of the movie was great, but it depended on a good ending to cap it off and justify it. To me, the ending went beyond ‘making a point’ to just being stupid. It was a bit like the X-Files, which kept us on the edge of our seats for all those years, wondering how they were going to tie everything together, until we realised (some quicker than others) that they weren’t even going to try - that everything was just nonsense. That’s what I thought of Charlie’s screenplay.
Seeing as the methods of post-modernism are at least 40 years old now, you need to do more than just be self-referential and self-consciously clever to make a movie interesting and worthwhile. If the point of Adaptation was to say that you can’t make a successful movie without resorting to all the cliches in the book (to use another cliche), it doesn’t seem like much of a point to make. There have already been plenty of movies made about ‘nothing’ - hell, one of the most successful sitcoms of all time sold itself on just that concept.
If the point was that during the late 1990’s, a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman couldn’t come up with a good ending to a movie based on flowers, then I really couldn’t care less. Unless I knew him personally, and wanted some insight into my buddy’s mind, why should I care?
I suppose I was hoping that Charlie would find something out that I didn’t know already, and that I would experience something other than cynicism (his, and then mine).
I was seeing the film in 2 dimensions, which is 1 dimension more than I think most people will see it.
But really, it could be 3 or 4. I knew that the ending was basically (in real life) Kaufman sort of ‘giving up’, (which in retrospect, might not be true, if that was the plan from the beginning). So you have the end of the movie and the rest of it that made complete sense, and I assumed it was true that Kaufman had difficulty adapting the book to a movie in real life. I shouldn’t have done that, because in reality, this whole story’s “spine” was probably thought up one sitting. Perhaps Kaufman thought up the idea before even READING “The Orchid Thief”.
I’m sure you’ve all considered this by now…
I feel bad that it’s taking me this long to get as far as I’ve gotten in understanding this movie.
I don’t think the point of the movie was to say you HAVE to resort to typical Hollywood elements, I think the point of the movie was that CHARLIE had to resort to this. Or the character of the character. I think Charlie in the movie was based on a fictional Charlie that was based on the ‘real life’ Charlie. The point is, that the REAL Charley might have planned on things ending up as they did from the start. Look at “Malkovich”. Malkovich didn’t really PLAY himself, nor did he play a person tightly BASED on himself. He played a man based on an exaggerated (“cartoon”) Malkovich, based on the real life Malkovich. I wish I could explain better.
Interesting. Do you think this was specifically created by the real Charlie Kaufman to express his frustration with Hollywood standards and expectations? Making a successful movie of that is definitely a fun way to go about it.
Umm, Donald’s dead. Even the dedication at the end of the film (after the quote from “The 3”) is to Donald. They might win the Oscar but Charlie will have to accept for both.
Who else wants to see a “The 3” movie? i remember reading a mystery story a long time ago about a detective who was after a guy, and found out he was chasing himself, because both the killer and him were missing their big toe. He ended up going to jail at night, but being free in the day.
I realize this thread is old news, but I’m always the last one to the party. A friend recommended that I skip Adaptation until it comes out on DVD, so I hadn’t bothered to see it. (And wouldn’t have seen it tonight, except that I’d paid to see Chicago and made it about 10 minutes in before I realized I wanted to do anything other than watch the rest of that movie.)
Anyway… holy crap! I think this was possibly the most brilliant movie I’ve ever seen! I don’t want to overload on the hyperbole, but I was near tears for most of it, just marvelling at what a work of genius it was.
Even the positive reviews I’d read of the movie tend to simplify it as a “meta-storytelling gimmick” or a story about writer’s block. So I thought I knew what to expect from it. But even calling it an innovative, creative story about writer’s block isn’t doing it justice.
Exactly! And that parallels the book; the author was a complete outsider (a writer for one of the most upper-class intellectual publications in the country) who learned over the course of researching the story that there was more to it than a simple human-interest piece about backwater hicks who get obsessed about flowers. The screenplay is about an overly-intellectual writer who learns over the course of adapting the screenplay that there’s more to it than even what is expressed in the book.
The true beauty of the book is that it finds greater meaning in what is ostensibly a completely dry subject. The beauty of the movie is that if finds greater meaning in what is ostensibly a completely unfilmable book. In part, the book is about the process of creating the book (actually, researching the story) itself, just as the film is about the process of creating the film itself.
I think you explained it fine, but I don’t entirely agree. I don’t think that Kaufman ever “had” to resort to a Hollywood-ized version of the script, and I don’t think that it was just a case of satirizing Hollywood cliches, either. As others have pointed out, the ending was telegraphed all throughout the movie. Kaufman tells the producer he doesn’t want to turn it into the obvious drug running and sex story, but of course that’s how it ends. The screenwriter tells Kaufman that you have to wow them in the third act, and soon after we get the action sequences.
But it’s not just some “hey, look! Irony!” gimmick. Orlean (at least in the movie) initially rejected Laroche as nothing more than an odd character, the surface-level eccentric that even the most shallow person in the world (the agent) could recognize as being “interesting.” It wasn’t until she actually spent time with him and in his “culture” of collecting and obsession, that she learned the truth of the story and how it applied to her personally.
Charlie Kaufman (at least in the movie) initially rejected his “brother’s” screenplay and the advice of the screenwriter as shallow and formulaic; he was more concerned with creating art, something meaningful. It wasn’t until he went through the process of an action-filled, gimmicky Hollywood ending that he learned the truth of the story (“owning” your love for something or someone instead of judging yourself based on how others perceive you) and how it applied to him personally.
