We watched Adaptation.
(2002) as a class on February 10th.
The third act of Adaptation.
raises some fascinating questions—first and foremost of which is, “Just what
exactly is going on?”
It is certainly a valid question. About two-thirds of the
way through the movie, Charlie Kauffman asks Donald, “How would you end the
screenplay?” I believe that the last third of the film is Donald’s response to
Charlie—this is the ending he would
write. The jarring tonal shift that follows is impossible to miss. The film is
no longer a leisurely-paced comedy driven by the quirky neurosis of our hero;
instead it becomes something of a crime-thriller actioner, riddled with
clichés, complete with car chases and horrific deaths.
Why, then, is this the version of the film Charlie
ultimately settles upon? He has made it quite clear that he wants a highly
original film, cliché-free, and “true” to the author’s book. We have discussed
the various ways a film can be “true” or “faithful” to its source in class—by retaining
the themes, the characters, or through an “equivalence of meaning”—but Charlie
takes it to a new level. He venerates the book and its author, Susan Orlean,
for whom he has clearly developed a kind of infatuation. He desperately fears
disappointing her by producing something that he does not love as much as the
book. When Charlie complains that the book has no story, he is told, “Well make
one up.” Out of respect to the author, however, he refuses to do so.
What Charlie fails to realize, however, is that the book is
already an adaptation—an adaptation of the real life story of Laroche. Orlean
struggles to capture the essence of Laroche faithfully. She is noticeably
troubled when her dinner party guests misinterpret her portrayal of Laroche,
finding Laroche’s idiosyncrasies laughably backward. The passion Orlean sees in
him and respects him for is something she cannot seem to replicate in a way
that her readers will understand. Susan Orlean is to Charlie as Laroche is to
Orlean; both authors feel such a deep respect for their sources that they
cannot bear to do them injustice.
The next question then is this: can you still be respectful
of the source material if you change it? A large portion of the film focuses on
Charlie’s abysmal failure to adapt the book without “changing it.” The film
never really answers the question of respect, but it does seem to suggest that
adaptation without change is impossible. As Robert Stam points out in his article
“Beyond Fidelity,” a book is strictly a verbal medium, whereas film has many
tracks—sound, light, both written and spoken word—making adaptation, in the
most literal sense, impossible (76). Having read the article “Orchid Fever,”
Charlie’s problem is clear: there is simply not enough story or plot to make an
interesting movie. Susan Orlean herself described the book as “particularly
unsuited” to adaptation (see second clip). Though he strives to make a movie
that resembles “real life”—without drama or life lessons—his script just is not
working out. Perhaps one difference between the mediums of film and the written
word is that film requires more drama and plot than the latter does, particularly
in the case of non-fiction. Would a movie without a conflict or crisis even be
worth seeing? McKee believes it would be uninteresting, boring, and a waste of
everyone’s time (see clip). A film
without such structure would not be a film, just a series of images or scenes
without anything to hold them together or propel it forward. Charlie mistakes
structure for cliché, and as a result, cannot create a screenplay worth
filming.
After the film ended, I found myself wondering how else the
film could have ended. I came up with nothing. The real Charlie Kauffman must
have had a similar thought—and that, I believe, is the reason the film has the
ending that it does. At some point, he realized that his struggles to adapt
such a challenging source made a better story than the source itself. In an
interview concerning Adaptation., Susan Orlean said, “I don’t see how you could have made
a conventional film from the book…I felt that it was truer to the book than a
conventional film could have been.”
Perhaps by giving us a “Hollywood” ending, Kauffman is
addresses the whole reason we like to see such endings—sometimes, they just
make for a more satisfying movie.
What do you think? How would you have ended the film if you
were adapting The Orchid Thief? How
would you have added drama and conflict to the plot without devising a (highly
fictionalized) new ending?
Corrigan, Timothy. Film
and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012. Print.
