Adaptation

AroView: Another virtuoso post-modern comedy from the team behind BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, with a miraculously adapted Nicolas Cage – in identical twin roles – giving the best performance(s) of his recent career.

Complicated without being confusing, it follows two successive storylines that play concurrently; a neurotic, dowdy screenwriter (Cage) struggles to write a film adaptation of a novel about “flowers”, while author Meryl Streep researches the original novel some years earlier in the Florida swamp-marshes with an eccentrically inspirational Chris Cooper. Cage’s easy-going twin brother (or alter-ego) provides an amusing running-gag at Hollywood’s expense as an opportunistic, hack writer with few ideas and fewer scruples.

Layer on top of that the possibility that we’re watching the final product as it may have been adapted, this is a film about striving to be original and successful on one’s own terms, which is pretty much what writer Charlie Kaufman (also the character’s name) manages to achieve, and without alienating those that don’t know the first thing about screenwriting.