Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) trails journalist Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), seeking to find a way to adapt her book "The Orchid Thief" to the screen, in Columbia Pictures' unconventional comedy "Adaptation." (Gannett News Service, Ben Kaller/Columbia Pictures). Adaptation Starring: Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper. Director: Spike Jonze. Rated R: Profanity, sexuality, graphic violence. Running time: 114 minutes. view the trailer | official website Charlie Kaufman is a confused L.A. screenwriter overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy, sexual frustration, self-loathing, and by the screenwriting ambitions of his freeloading twin brother Donald. While struggling to adapt The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, Kaufman's life spins from pathetic to bizarre. The lives of Kaufman, Orlean, and John Laroch--the orchid poacher and the subject of Orlean's book--become strangely intertwined as as each one's search for passion collides with the other's.

by Marshall Fine, Gannett News Service

It's hard to imagine a movie more audaciously, self-referential and just plain weirdly funny than Spike Jonze's "Adaptation."

Written by Charlie Kaufman, his collaborator on "Being John Malkovich," this film plays games within games and tells stories within stories, toying with its source material, its characters, its creators and its own existence.

Here's a movie that, in many ways, is all back-story, the part of the plot that happens before the movie gets started. Kaufman and Jonze have made a movie that, in essence, is about why they couldn't make this movie - and then did anyway.

Kaufman (who also wrote this year's underrated "Human Nature" and the upcoming "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind") has made himself the central character in this film. As played by Nicolas Cage, Kaufman is a guy suffering with success. Even as his script for "Malkovich" is being made, the chubby, balding writer is struggling with his next assignment (as well as with his own physical and social shortcomings, for which he constantly derides himself).

Specifically, he's been hired to adapt Susan Orlean's nonfiction best seller, "The Orchid Thief," into a film. Orlean's book is about a Florida man named John Laroche (Chris Cooper), who was arrested for taking orchids out of a state wildlife refuge. He went to court, saying he was merely a consultant for local Native Americans, whom he claimed had been granted the right to do whatever they wanted with local flora and fauna by Florida law.

Scenes from Orlean's book are dramatized, with Meryl Streep playing Orlean. But they are presented as flashes of Kaufman's imagination. And though they seem solid enough, Kaufman can't figure out how to organize them in a way that works.

He has a woman who is obviously interested in him named Amelia (Cara Seymour), but he can't make himself do anything about it. Meanwhile, his twin brother Donald (also played by Cage in a delightful dual turn) has moved into his house and has announced that he, too, has decided to become a screenwriter. He intends to write a serial-killer thriller about a murderer with a split personality.

(For the record, though "Adaptation's" script is credited to both Charlie and Donald Kaufman, there is no real Donald Kaufman. He's one more device in what seems like a bottomless bag of Kaufman inventions.)

Jonze bops back and forth between Kaufman's increasingly tortured efforts at adapting the book and Orlean's own efforts to understand and absorb Laroche's love for orchids. Eventually, the obsessed Charlie, who has come up with nothing after weeks of writing, develops a new passion - for the unseen Orlean. He goes to New York to meet her - at which point "Adaptation" suddenly shifts into a wildly unpredictable gear that pulls together - and makes fun of - everything that has come before.

Kaufman's neuroses place him somewhere between Woody Allen and Larry David, with a deadpan anguish that will tickle some and unnerve others. As played by Cage, he's a pudgy, sweaty bundle of insecurities.

But Kaufman the writer is as subversive as they come, as he showed in "Malkovich," that startlingly funny examination of celebrity in our modern world. He has the perfect partner in Jonze, an explosively playful stylist who finds the visual equivalent for each of Kaufman's wild flights of fancy.

Jonze is loose and imaginative, a director with a keen eye for both the intensely human and the intensely silly, not to mention the offhandedly absurd.

Streep doesn't have as much showy material as Cage or Cooper, but she turns on a dime near the end, transforming herself for the film's finale and handling the hairpin turns her character must negotiate. She's fearless and unafraid of looking silly or unattractive if it serves the joke and the film.

"Adaptation" takes us inside the head of Charlie Kaufman in the same way "Being John Malkovich" invaded that actor's skull. He and Jonze have come up with what is easily the year's most original film, one that could change your idea of just what a movie can be.