Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of the wonderful 1999 fantasy Being John Malkovich, is a whiny, sniveling bore. Self-conscious to the point of near-paralysis, he basically wills himself into being exactly as pathetic as he thinks he is, constantly calling himself fat and bald when in fact he's merely overweight and balding — not the same thing. Of course, I suppose if you work in Hollywood, it is the same thing.

In any case, he's so overwhelmingly unappealing that it's a wonder he gets work, or keeps the seemingly only friend he has. I'm not talking about the real Kaufman, mind you. The real, or should I say "real," Kaufman has, by all accounts, a healthy head of hair and a wiry frame. A bit vertically challenged, but that's not too uncommon, particularly if you work in Hollywood. The "real" Kaufman doesn't give too many interviews, and in those interviews, he doesn't let on too much about his life. The Kaufman I'm talking about is the Kaufman presented as a character in the latest film that the "real" Kaufman has written, the Kaufman portrayed by a very self-effacing Nicolas Cage in Adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze, who also helmed Malkovich.

The screen Kaufman is a creature whose suffocating self-loathing is exacerbated by his latest assignment: to write an adaptation of Susan Orlean's evocative mix of reportage and memoir and philosophy, The Orchid Thief. Averring to a studio exec early on that he has no intention of turning Orlean's tome into "Hollywood bullshit," the amazingly miserable scribe conjures himself a case of writer's block that's almost as terrifying as what the doomed Jack Torrance suffered in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Not helping matters is Kaufman's cheerfully dim-witted twin brother, Donald (a fictional character who is credited with cowriting the script to this film — I know, I know, but stay with me), who's living in Kaufman's house and trying to concoct a screenplay of his own, using structure guru Robert McKee's infamous Story as a manual.

This is a movie that's impossible to synopsize, and there would be no point in doing so anyway. Suffice it to say that Orlean, her Orchid Thief subject John Laroche, and McKee himself all turn up as characters in the unfolding scenario (and their "real"-life counterparts should be flattered that such stellar actors are playing them: Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, and Brian Cox, respectively). Said scenario has plenty of elements of both parody and satire — parody being a game and satire being a lesson, as Nabokov pointed out — but, as effectively as these elements are played out in the movie (Ron Livingston's slick, squalid agent, for example, is a wrenchingly nasty twist on a Tinseltown commonplace), ultimately, Adaptation is neither. Like Malkovich, it has a strongly Kafkaesque element; in a way, despite being largely a Hollywood story, it's quite a literary film. If it can be classified at all, I'd call it fantastic, in every sense of that word. Despite all of its convolutions and unstinting cleverness, the movie really is about something, and it finds a genuinely new way to achieve a quality that so many Hollywood films aspire to and end up actually opposing — which is to say that Adaptation is life-affirming. A lot of cultural and political commentators have gone on about how recent events have killed postmodernism. This movie proves that not only is postmodernism not dead, but that it can be good for you.

— Glenn Kenny