Adaptation

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From the book The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean

This is the short review. The long review contains SPOILERS and you really do want to read this marvelous book first, and then see what they do with it in the movie.

And that’s all I’m going to say, except, yes, it’s worth watching, and no, it’s not what you’d expect, believe me.

If you haven’t read the book AND seen the movie, stop here and do it first.

This is the long review, and it contains MAJOR SPOILERS. Trust the Otter, you really do want to read this marvelous book first, and then see what they do with it in the movie, and THEN come back and read my review.

No hurry, I’ll be waiting right here. We’ll have lots to talk about.

<looks at watch>

You back yet? Good.

Ottersis and I were in Florida, and she had brought this knowing that I had read and loved the book, and that I had spent the day driving through the areas the book talks about. She really likes this movie, and will probably not be happy that I have decided that I didn’t. But she’s a good sister and will not be mad at me for making my own decision, no matter how wrong she thinks I am…

So firstly, it was a great book, full of interesting stuff about John Laroche, who gives whole new meanings to the concept of white trash, but who is a fascinating character. Orlean does a wonderful job of bringing the history of not only orchids and orchid hunting but Laroche’s life and the history of Florida and several other places alive.

And then there’s this movie. The only other movie I have seen about the difficulty of making an unfilmable book into a movie is Tristram Shandy; I expected this to be something like that, parts of the book being filmed and a lot of discussion of how unfilmable it is.

And was I ever wrong!

Firstly, as wonderful as the book was, it did seem to me to be unfilmable: a bunch of tangentially related vignettes about people, places and plants. Getting around that by making the movie actually be about the poor schmuck who has to turn this unfilmable book into a screenplay was a brilliant idea, and casting ex-Serious Honey Nicholas Cage as both the screenwriter and his loser twin brother worked brilliantly.

Meryl Streep was, as always, superb, and Chris Cooper as the lowlife ne’er-do-well Laroche was just amazing. There were so many good things about this movie: the double-entendre of the title, the acting, even Cage’s self-pitying whining was good. I also enjoyed the way that during the movie they managed to break every rule they laid down for ‘don’t do this in a movie’, finally giving the game away in the last scene.

You’d think this would be a real winner.

And yet. For some reason, it wasn’t.

I think I partly had trouble with the fact that they were completely destroying the line between real and unreal, not to give the viewer some kind of vision or illumination or knowledge, but just for the hell of it. “Look, we can play with your mind like THIS!” was the feeling I got. And unlike the movie Being John Malkovich, which had some wonderful thoughtful things to say about the nature of subjective reality, this had the feeling of frat boys pushing each other to see how far they could go with the characters.

I really didn’t like the way that, by the end, the writer (Susan Orlean) and her subject, Laroche, lived out a fantasy of their real lives (and was actually wondering about lawsuits…evidently so were the producers.) But this deliberate mishmosh of fact and fiction just didn’t work for me- it was too self-conciously clever, I think, and had me saying, Huh? a lot.

So yes, I know it’s a VERY FAMOUS MOVIE and has WON AWARDS and GARNERED CRITICAL ACCLAIM. Not my cup of tea, sorry. And I wonder how many people were kept from reading that truly wonderful book by the fact that it’s NOT anything like the movie, but is instead full of SCIENCE AND HISTORY AND GOOD WRITING? Sad, I call it.

So for goodness’ sake, read the book. If you must, see the movie, it is interesting and it does have moments. Just don’t expect it to be brilliant.

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This is the USA Today article about the movie Adaptation, from January 2003. I’m posting it here in its entirety just in case it moves or disappears.

She could have sued. Instead, she laughed. The movie Adaptation portrays real-life author Susan Orlean in so perversely inaccurate a manner that studio executives were “terrified” that Orlean might halt the production, she says.

Meryl Streep portrays Orlean in the film as a drug-taking adulterer who, among other shenanigans, posts topless photographs of herself on the Internet.

None of that is true, insists Orlean, who wrote the best seller The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession, on which the movie is based. Now playing in 110 theaters, the movie opens on more screens Jan. 10.

Orlean commits none of the movie misdeeds in the book.

Or in life.

“There were a whole lot of legal issues,” Orlean says. “They felt that if I didn’t say yes, the whole project would be shot.”

In fact, when Columbia Pictures sent her Charlie (Being John Malkovich) Kaufman’s script, Orlean was instructed to contact studio executives the minute she finished it.

“I didn’t call them right away, which was probably a bit of intentional torture on my part,” Orlean says. “I found out later that they were just sweating bullets waiting for me. You have to give permission to be portrayed in a movie.”

But in truth, Orlean says, she found the unorthodox adaptation “very interesting.” She doesn’t mind at all that her straightforward non-fiction account of an illicit scheme to steal some of Florida’s wild and endangered ghost orchids could become a movie about screenwriter Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) and his feverish inability to turn the non-fiction book into a movie.

She doesn’t care that a preposterous version of her became a character in the film.

“I think it’s wild,” Orlean says. “The drug stuff didn’t bother me because it was so clearly absurd and over the top. … It’s better than if I was shown torturing animals or something.”

She did worry at first that the movie shows her having an affair with the subject of her book, John Laroche, the orchid thief – something she says she would never do.

But in the end, Orlean was thrilled, and she even made a cameo appearance as a scowling waitress in the film. (She has red hair and freckles, is half Hungarian and half Polish-Russian and is 47.)

She would, however, like to clear up the record.

“I’m a very upstanding citizen and an extremely ethical journalist,” says Orlean, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine who also wrote the article on which the surfing movie Blue Crush was based. Her boring husband in the movie is nothing like her then-husband and nothing like her current husband, neither of whom is boring, she adds.

At first, Orlean was “bummed out” that Adaptation isn’t called The Orchid Thief, because she figured the title change would hurt her book sales. But once she realized how much her story had been changed, she was glad, especially since the title of the book is mentioned over and over in the film, and the book cover is shown.

“But my parents were just beside themselves, they were so upset,” she says. “I said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s really OK.’ When they see it, they’ll probably worry that it’s going to impugn my reputation.”

But Orlean isn’t worried.

“The people who know me know what’s true and what’s not true,” she says. “The people who read my work can probably guess what’s real and not real. The general public? Let’s hope they get it. And if they don’t, they won’t think I’m a real person. Or they’ll just think I’m wild.

“And in the general scheme of things, I’d rather be perceived as wild than boring.”

Copyright 2008 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.