Adaptation. 4K 2002

What does Kaufman have in store for us?

I had heard about 'Adaptation' long before I decided to see it. The film had been in my possession for several years, waiting for its time, and the box was almost finger-thick with dust. Admittedly, two films based on scripts by Kaufman - 'Being John Malkovich' and 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' - in my list of favorites, so 'Adaptation' I went to watch it quite prepared to see the spectacle of a strange, sophisticated and if not aesthetic, at least, demanding. The most interesting thing about movies based on Kaufman's scripts are the plot surprises. Charlie Kaufman, more than anyone else, knows how to play with the viewer, playing with his complete lack of understanding of what is happening and the unexpectedness of each next step. The question 'Well, what next?' in these films is quite legitimate, it's not 'Transformers', where before you start watching a movie, you can retell the script verbatim. You have to adapt to each new Kaufman film in a new way because anything can happen in them! He's a master of puzzling, paradoxical plots and the surrealism of their execution.

Charlie Kaufman seems to have a lot of slop in his head. Normal screenwriters write screenplays and leave the slop to the brain-eating cockroaches of every self-respecting creative person. Kaufman thought - what if the slop could be worth something? So he poured it out on paper, and he gave it to his old friend Spike Jones, who was not the first to dig through Kaufman's intricacies, so he was not too surprised and made a film. And this film once again caused a furor among aesthetes and critics, gathered an impressive heap of awards and even a good box office. And everyone immediately began to feel sorry for poor Charlie Kaufman, who in such agony created, together with his late brother, a new masterpiece. After all, Kaufman is a sweet, indecisive chick with catastrophic hair loss, infantilism in everything, sweaty palms and a tendency to be obese, unable to communicate with women, tired, pessimistic, almost suicidal tendencies.

It probably didn't even occur to most of the audience that Kaufman was just a fraud. Exactly - with his slop. There was no heartfelt conversation between a reflective intellectual and a psychoanalytic spectator. In the chair opposite the spectator sat a rather impudent, cynical and quite cocky fellow who made fun of the spectator to no end by telling an invented story of his 'difficult' creative pursuits from beginning to end. How he would pour out his heart! After he had punched a hole in the brain of False Malkovich and made the spectator feel sorry for the great actor who had no need of pity, after he had adapted 'human nature' to himself in 'Beastly Nature', it was already clear that he would not show anything ordinary and truthful. And all this cacophony of himself, of real people around him, of flirting with what was happening before, now and in the future, as well as with what is happening in the present, past and future, but in the imagination, and not only of Kaufman himself, of psychoanalysis and philosophy - to all appearances, one big hoax and mockery.

The sly Kaufman, the hilarious Kaufman, the scheming Kaufman and the epathetic falsifier, not unlike the pathetic, panicked Nicolas Cage, made critics swirl around like terrors on a frying pan, trying to outdo each other in cinematic terms and profound sayings, the audience - bashfully hiding their eyes, not knowing whether to scold or praise what everybody likes so much, but what they absolutely did not understand, and the academicians sweat like that pseudo-Kaufman and decide hastily - to give or not to give the damn smart guy an Oscar and how he will share the Oscar with his brother, whom he does not have. They didn't. Then they did, when Kaufman softened the pressure and put his schizophrenia into a romantic shell. They couldn't not give it to him.

About the plot, as I said, it makes no sense to talk here. It gallops through times, stories and pictures, it is as impetuous as a human thought and as wafflingly passive as a retired old clown. It is philosophical to the extent that the viewer needs to believe it to be philosophical, but not a gram more, as truthful as Kaufman has seen fit to lift the veil of mystery over his Ego and as crumpled as the thoughts in that pseudo-Kaufman's head are crumpled. Kaufman confuses, loops and leads to an ending in light of which one wants to ask the question - what is this guy smoking? Where in Hollywood's general scriptwriting crisis does he get his always wacky, but so cool and so different from the flowing pictures? Either Kaufman really is a genius, or a daredevil, or an addict. Or he just has a very clever agent who manages to get all the brainwashing dope Kaufman sells in conservative and cowardly Hollywood under the guise of scripts. Seriously - he's so easy to get hooked on. I've seen 'Malkovich' like 6 times, and 'Adaptation' made me want to re-watch it right afterwards! Kaufman hypnotizes, lulls the alert with the realism of the story!

Why did actors like Cage, Streep and Cooper, who are offered many roles in movies, choose these particular ones? Judging by the performance and the images they created, they were attracted by the opportunity for artistic reflection on their own head slop. Certainly the role of Cage. It's not for him with his goatee look to play tough guys, but in 'Adoption' you adapt to him quickly and believe him unconditionally. Fat, sweaty, unattractive, scared. But the ROLE, not the stamp. And Meryl Streep captures her role - there's nothing in common between her character at the beginning and her own character at the end! And Chris Cooper so selflessly told us from the screen about the meaning and significance of the hard 'feat' of these 'scientists'.

Of course, you have to adapt to this film, as well as to everything this psycho - Kaufman and his associates are doing. But if you adapt, you'll discover the great truth! Just kidding! Just accept the rules of the game and then the movie won't seem dull or uninteresting or unimpressive. A highly artistic surrealist attraction, a mockingly ironic farce that won the Grand Jury Prize and the Silver Bear in Berlin. They probably didn't know what to give it for and gave it just the grand prize - for the flawlessness of the Kaufmanian schizoid lie.