Hope Springs

Breathe 
or 
Breaking Noses and the Fourth Wall

When Tommy Lee Jones was interviewed on "Inside the Actors Studio" and they got to the point where James Lipton asks "those" questions, and he was asked "What word do you hate?" Jones curled his lip and said "Cute."

Fortunately, he's in Hope Springs, which, unfortunately, is the very definition of "cute," and manages to take some of the smirk out of it and put in the sting.  The tale of a pair of "empty-nesters" trying to rekindle the pilot light of their marriage and claw out of their rut, it is merely saved by the stalwart efforts of Jones and Meryl Streep, who say more with their body language—his trudging walk and her nervous, frustrated sighs—than any blunt dialogue could convey.  The script by Vanessa Taylor (she's written for "Everwood," "Alias," "Game of Thrones" and created the short-lived but well-regarded "Jack & Bobby"—quite the gamut, there) is long on touchy-feely aphorisms about metaphors, commitment and getting outside your comfort zone, dispensed by marriage counselor Steve Carell, who cuts out the dangerous aspects of his comedy potential and replaces it with wan smiles and scrutinizing eyes.  David Frankel's direction (he directed Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, directed Marley and Me and last year's The Big Year) is safe, but sound (which makes you wonder why he's not directing for The Weinsteins, and he's much more adventurous when working in TV) and keeps things from getting too treacly.

The pressure, then, is on Streep and Jones to bring everything to the table and they're an interesting study in contrasts.  She's all invention, imaginatively communicating with extraneous gestures of agitation and nuance, that burst out of her in spurts.  Jones is instinctive, making the text real with superb line readings with a minimum of fuss—funny as Jones' character is the fussy one, complaining constantly, passively aggressive, and not offering much in the way of support.  Both have issues and neither is entirely blameless—it takes two to make a bad marriage—but the sympathies throughout are with Streep's character, which is hammered home by the director and actress in moments of her satisfaction, by having her look directing at the camera for some sort of conspiratorial communal support from the audience ("Ladies...").

A little of that goes a long, long way,* and exposes that the film is geared to a female audience of a certain age and like-minded sympathies.  Such pandering mars the film, taking it out of the situation, and, by acknowledging the intended audience, shatters the illusion of reality, making it a staged presentation.  They might as well break into song, if this film about commitment isn't going to commit to anything.

Hope Springs is a blue-haired Rental.

* Too far actually, and in the days after watching the film, the feeling that it recalled for me in a previous film experience is Anthony Perkins smiling directly at the camera at the end of Psycho (There are other straight-on shots in the film—Marion driving, the patrolman, Arbogast—but they're usually looking past the audience, eyes unfocused, not directly at the audience).

The Iron Lady

Keeping Up Appearances
or
"Don't Want to Dig Around Too Much, M'. You Don't Know What You Might Find."

The Weinstein's last bid in 2011 to win an audience of Anglophiles seems a trifle desperate and might be a bit too early to give the subject proper justice, like Oliver Stone's Nixon or W.—we're still too close to the Thatcher years to have any sort of perspective, other than a cursory glance at the events that shaped the Conservative years of the '80's.  What damage was done, what was gained, is still unknowable, especially given the subsequent Blair years and how British-American relationships changed and coalesced.  We get highlights and lowlights, but no illumination, and, instead, we get a look-back, not unlike Nixon's drunken reverie, but this time filtered through Maggie's Alzheimic reflections, with the dementia-figure of her dead husband Denis' presence as a Iago-like devil's advocate (played by Jim Broadbent, in just the way you think he would, a little dotty, but with a puckish edge).  Really, both of them deserve a little better, no matter what one thinks of the politics.

But, the Alzheimer's is a good tool if someone wants to do a hatchet-job.  The disease brings the past into crystal clarity (for the afflicted, not for the story-teller), while also undercutting the reliability of the narrator in the present day.  Hardly seems fair, as the two women who wrote and directed The Iron Lady (Abi Morgan and Phyllida Lloyd) do seem sincere about presenting the hurdles that Thatcher had to overcome in her ambition to seek change, achieve office, and, in becoming a political animal, save her party and become PM.  The role could have easily gone into caricature, were it not for Thatcher's best supporter in the film, Meryl Streep .

The role ultimately won LaStreep another Oscar (and, say what you will about the "unfairness of it all," she does deserve it—this is an amazing performance) and it contains her hallmark studied approach with the same intricate nuances she brings to every role—the rock-solid accent, the filigreed gestures, the interesting way she fills up the pauses and held-shots with interesting choices that are unexpected, but deeply felt.  In the elderly sections, she doesn't quite have the "thousand-yard-stare" I've seen in Alzheimer's patients, but the frailties are there, right down to the quaking-arms-under-pressure and the processing pauses that flash through without making a big deal of them.  Streep's always good, good enough that one might take her for granted, but this one's practically a one-woman show and certainly the best thing in a film that's "too little-too soon."

The Iron Lady is a Rental.

Lions for Lambs

This week, we're re-publishing some reviews of the films from the post 9-11 environment.

"Never engage the enemy for too long, or he will adapt to your tactics"

Carl Von Clausewitz

There are three arenas in play, and as the film begins the protagonists are checking their ledgers and statistics: Lt. Col. Falco (Peter Berg) is checking his strategy briefings; Senator Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise) is looking at dropping poll numbers; Professor Steven Malley (Robert Redford) is checking the quarter's attendance; Reporter Janine Roth (Meryl Streep) is looking at her unopened note-book--an empty slate. Thus begins Lions for Lambs* a polemic about the current Middle-East War, the entities that package and sell it, and the public that may not like it, but won't do anything to oppose it. All the stories intersect a bit and the movie takes place over a few hours. The script is by Matthew Michael Carnehan, who also wrote The Kingdom Its director, Peter Berg, who plays Falco here, said that film was "98% Action, 2% Message." Here, that ratio is reversed, and, man, is it tedious.

 First off, there is a heavy veneer of liberal self-satisfaction (though not as much as when conservatives put the hammer down). The senator is a Republican tyro, trying to bolster his party's (and his) poll numbers by setting up a new front in Afghanistan (Senator's can do that? I mean besides Charlie Wilson?) He's given Roth a solid hour (this is supposedly a big deal) to argue his case that this attack (no, really, this one!) will win the war in Afghanistan, the war on terror, the hearts and minds of Afghans (he really says this) and presumably bring the troops back home for Christmas (he doesn't say this, but he might as well have). Cruise was bio-engineered for this role (and you just know this is the part Redford would have taken during his career in the cynical 1960's), an opportunistic-photo-op-ready politico, with flags on the desk, pants-press in the office, and flashing Chiclets in his mouth, while Meryl Streep is all shambling messiness, trying to counter the arguments (is that her job?) that Cruise spins on the head of a pin. Their section is the sort of "greased-pig" argument and obfuscation bull-session that keeps me from watching the "pundit" shows--nothing's less fun or informative than watching two used-policy salesmen, hectoring each other trying to get their feet stuck in the open door of your mind. Finally it gets down to my favorite argument when rats-on-their-hind-legs are cornered--The Multiple Choice Bottom-Liner: "Do you want to win the War on Terror: Yes or No?". ("Well, I don't know, Senator, when did you stop beating your wife?") At one point Streep asks, "When does the new offensive start?" Cruise looks at his (supposed) Rolex. "Ten minutes ago." So much for pre-selling.

And in that ten minutes, the mission is already SNAFU'd, when two grunts are bounced out of a helicopter taking heavy fire, turning the offensive thrust into a rescue mission. Not a good start to winning those hearts and minds.
And by a curious coincidence--or a heavy-handed ploy by the screenwriter--those very two soldiers were both students in Professor Malley's political science class, who, in a school project capped their volunteerism argument by enlisting. Now, Malley uses them to guilt a slacker-student who can't be bothered coming to class because he's "busy with stuff," into considering a more activist stance before the bigger challenges of jobs, mortgages, ball-games, and watching "American Idol" zombies away any chance of him doing any critical thinking for the rest of his life. That's a valid argument to make, whichever side of the aisle you take bribes on. But instead of making the arguments, Malley turns them into three-corner shots that kind of dance around the problem, rather than saying something, oh, like "I would suggest you start coming to class or I will flunk your lazy frat-ass: your call."

The trouble here is that the issues are so immediate that the arguments the film is making were too late four years ago. So, it's a bit like soft-ball preaching to the choir. The arguments are sound, but they have very little relevance to extricating us from the tar-pit of this conflict, and, yes, people are getting chewed up by it, but that's the business of war, and why you try to avoid it, rather than rush in like a damned fool. It's great to be able to say all this with 20-20 hind-smugness, but it's essentially useless. Now tell us something we don't know, and how we can avoid it the next time. "Is he failing you?" a fellow frat asks the student about his meeting. The movie certainly is.

"Lions for Lambs" is a cable-flick.

* The title derives from a phrase from World War I, but, the exact nature of the quote is subject to debate, and its history, like the film, is a bit muddled.

Julia

Julia (Fred Zinnemann, 1977) Alvin Sargent's literate, excellent screenplay begins with the aged Lillian Hellman sitting in a boat at twilight, fishing, while over the soundtrack the voice of Jane Fonda  (playing Hellman) talks of the phenomenon of some paintings that reveal earlier paintings below the surface pigments—"pentimento," because the canvas "remembers."

The story that makes the spine of this film is much in dispute.  Hellman swears it occurred exactly as she wrote about it, but that the woman, Julia (Vanessa Redgrave), seems to have disappeared without a trace of documentation that she ever existed, makes one suspect.  Hellman was a writer, above all—a dramatist.  She would not be the first to sacrifice the truth for a better story. It may be a case of a story shining through the layers of artistry, like pentimento.

In the film, Hellman recounts her girl-school friendship with the free-spirited Julia, and how they parted: Julia to study in Vienna, Lily to study in the States and pursue both a writing career and a long affair with writer Dashiell Hammett (Jason Robards).  The two keep in touch, but the free-spirited Julia becomes involved in anti-fascist groups, making her a target for assault.  Hellman uses a world-tour after her Broadway successes to sidetrack to Austria to try to find her friend, who is hiding from the authorities, who, if they catch her, will most assuredly kill her.

It boasts a great cast (both Robards and Redgrave deservedly won Supporting Oscars), with Maximilian Schell, Hal Holbrook, and, in her film debut, a young brunette actress named Meryl Streep.*  Zinnemann's direction is unfussy skipping back in memory, and recounting the desperate times.  The film was edited by Walter Murch, one of his first editing jobs that did not entail working for school-chums like Francis Coppola and George Lucas. 

This was the favorite film of the girl I was dating in college; we must have seen it five times or so, images, situations and lines of dialogue all burned into my memory, like etchings on a canvas.






* Her blonde hair was dyed for the part.  And she was great, right from the start.  I still remember, burned into my mind, how Streep turned a parting compliment into a dismissal: "You look very slim, Lillian..."

It's Complicated

"Karma is the Ultimate Bitch in this One"
or,
If You Can't Stand the Hot-Flash, Get Out of the Kitchen.

It's refreshing to see a movie about a mature couple of advanced age—mine—dealing with post break-up issues. I just wish they weren't being so immature while doing it.

Jane Adler (Meryl Streep) is reaching a transition point in her life—approaching "empty nester" age: her oldest daughter Lauren (Caitlin Fitzgerald) is engaged to Harley (John Krasinski), middle daughter Gabby (Zoe Kazan) is moving out of the house, and youngest, Luke (Hunter Parrish) is graduating from college. Her ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin) is now married to young "Ms. thang" Agness (Lake Bell), with an inherited son (from her last affair), Pedro (Emjay Anthony). She has decided that she's going to expand her nest...er, house so she can have "the kitchen she's always dreamed of;" she runs a salonish bakery, and she can cook (second movie this year—"Julie & Julia" from Nora Ephron, this one from Nancy Meyers, both of whom seem to be trying to keep Streep in the kitchen).

Youngest son's graduation pulls the whole family together in New York, with Jake "flying solo" due to family illness. Once there, the two old marrieds hook up, and once Jane is tanked, there occurs a "once more for old times' sake" canoodling that leaves him satisfied and her vomiting.

Most guys would take that as a sign, but not Jake. Soon, he's spending too much time at Jane's, telling his ex-wife that his wife doesn't understand him, and while it may seem like sweet revenge for Jane, she's also creeped out by it, so much so that she won't tell the kids, and allows it to interfere with a budding romance with her architect (Steve Martin). Now, maybe I've been watching too many "Nature" shows on elephants lately, but I could have used David Attenborough to explain this mating ritual to me.

Maybe it's that Martin and Baldwin are playing the roles the other should have taken: Martin's love interest is a deferential, shell-shocked divorcee with a manner that reminded me of Charlie Ruggles, and Baldwin's in full pursed lips obnoxious priss mode (without the "30 Rock" irony) that makes his character not so much funny as alarming. And Streep, consummate pro that she is, works the material for all its worth, fluttering and kvelling and kvetching, making Jane seem two pastries shy of a brunch. There are times when there seems to be some acknowledgment of time—Jane is constantly fanning herself, as if caught in a hot-flash, but the next instant she's giggling like "Juno."

The one guy who seems to be doing something interesting is John Krasinski, as the not-yet husband who finds he's baby-sitting his future in-laws, and is the only one who seems to rise above the material to be doing something interesting—interesting and funny. As the only fully-informed character in the cast, he manages to convey the screwball nature of the situation, acting as the surrogate audience, eyes widening with each embarrassing compromise. He makes Meyers the director—with her sledge-hammer reaction shots and uneven pacing seem far more successful than she is.

"It's Complicated" is simply a Rental.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

"Pure Wild Animal Craziness"

Tough to peg Wes Anderson. Idiosyncratic and gifted, sometimes he becomes so involved in his worlds on-screen that he forgets his audience. Sometimes, his films become trying—show of hands out there for everybody who liked "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou?"—although there are some folks who just can't warm to Anderson's culture clashes no matter how pop he gets. But, he keeps experimenting, pushing how unsympathetic or dysfunctional his characters could become, milking as little information from his frame set-ups as possible (calculate how much of his screen-time is associated with a character staring at the audience and you'd get a high percentage). There are the experiments in form, like the "Hotel Chevalier" prequel to "The Darjeeling Limited" that lent nothing— absolutely nothing—to the film, but because it was released to the Internet, it generated some "buzz."

Anderson goes out on a limb, too, with "Fantastic Mr. Fox," a stop-motion animation version of Roald Dahl's children's story,* Anderson's pop-culture sensibilities are rooted in the 1960's and 70's,** and one can feel tangible echoes of Rankin-Bass television specials, even the animation has a slight, clunky "Gumby" feel to it.*** Yet he manages to make a sly (like a fox) adaptation that speaks to both kids and adults in skewed ways.

F. F. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is a notorious chicken thief, who upon hearing his wife, Mrs. Fox (voiced by Meryl Streep) is pregnant (at the inopportune moment a trap has been sprung on them) makes a promise to her that he'll give up his chicken-pickin' ways and provide a stable home for his family. He becomes a newspaper writer ("Does anybody actually read my column?" he frequently asks), and although its a stable enough environment for a fox, its got none of the thrill of his old life. Appearing to go through a drastic mid-fox-life-crisis, he decides to buy a tree-house against the advice of his badger-lawyer (Bill Murray). And then, with the arrival of his nephew Kristofferson (Eric Chase Anderson)—an act that aggravates Fox's son Ash (Jason Schwartzman)—the domestication makes him snap and he decides to go for that "one big last job" (linking this George Clooney character to the ones in "Ocean's Eleven" and "Out of Sight"). The results are short-term windfalls, but at a cost, putting his family and the entire local animal kingdom at risk.**** Mr. Fox must learn complacency with domesticity, and life, such as it is.

Kids will like the animation and the jokes, which never stoop to the toilet level of average every-day kid's movies, and parents will like the playful adult sensibility Anderson and co-scenarist Noah Baumbach bring to the story: as an instance, all curse words are thrown into the all-inclusive hamper of "cuss," as in "What the cuss are you saying," and "This is going to be a cluster-cuss." And there's the shout-outs to cineastes (snooty children), including a "Citizen Kane"-based room-clearing that goes deliriously on and on (such destruction is tough to do one frame at a time, or in this case, two at a time). But, that burst of self-punishing annihilation may seem a bit drawn out and pointless to those who've never "seen the cockatoo," and presages some third act pacing problems that the film-makers probably can't see at such "whirr-click-whirr-click" speeds.

Fore-warned is fore-armed. Just let it go, send the kids out for some popcorn if they get restless, and admire how the animators make tears well-up in the characters' eyes, how Meryl Streep is still a brilliant actress with only her voice to fall back on, and how Clooney, without his expressive eyes, sounds a bit like an "empty suit." Adult concerns that you didn't worry about in childhood. Domesticity will do that to ya.

"Fantastic Mr. Fox" is a fantastic matinee.

* Are any of Dahl's books children's stories, really?

** The soundtrack starts off with "The Ballad of Davy Crockett," and goes on to include a couple of Beach Boys standards and "Street Fighting Man" by the Stones.

*** Not that the animation is bad—not at all—it has a jerkily primitive nostalgic feel to it, like an old claymation educational film, with a precise attention to detail, reminiscent of Willis H. O'Brien's original work "handling" King Kong.

**** Message Alert! Message Alert! Woop! Woop!

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

"Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events" (Brad Silberling, 2004) Oh, sure. For Hallowe'en on this site we featured flesh-eating zombies and vengeful demons and dead souls that wouldn't stay dead. But in the warm comfort of the domicile, many flights of stairs from the garret in which this is written, the Hallowe'en movie of choice was this (to be heretofore crunched to "Unfortunate Events" to avoid a cramp). It might be the best movie Barry Sonnenfeld never made. It has his insensibility, his florid camera moves,* snappy editing, austere framing and live-action cartoonish gambits (lots of shots of peoples' faces gaping into the camera).

But, it didn't have enough budget and so Brad Silberling took over the project.

Silberling is a chameleonic director; he tends to take on the characteristics of whatever project falls into his lap—handy for his long tenure as a television director of such idiosyncratic shows as "NYPD Blue," but making him hard to pin down as a feature director. How do you explain the disparity between "Unfortunate Events" and his unfortunate "City of Angels?" Before you attempt that, let me trump it by adding the even more unfortunate Will Ferrell vehicle, "Land of the Lost ."

So, it's perhaps fortunate for Silberling that so much of "Unfortunate Events" depends on others. The Lemony Snicket-styled writing—a bit like "Miss Manners" without her morning pick-me-up—of dark, despairing fore-shadowing** inspires a switch-back Rankin-Bass-styled opening that comes crashing to a halt. ("This would be an excellent time to walk out of the theater, living room, or airplane where this film is being shown." says the Lemony Narrator, as read by Jude Law)

"Fade to Black" is the more appropriate phrase. Fade to monochromatic gothic steam-punk macabre, (which permeates the film, like a lighter version of "The Addams Family") as the film takes up the sad misfortunes of the Baudelaire orphans: Violet, a voracious inventor (Emily Browning); Klaus, a voracious reader (Liam Aiken); and Sunny, a voracious biter (Kara Hoffman and Shelby Hoffman). When their parents are killed in a mysterious fire, the Estate (executed by a piggish Timothy Spall), the kids are shipped off to the cunning clutches of Count Olaf (Jim Carrey), a dispicable actor who only cares for the Beaudelaire fortune. Treated as servants by the fiend, he decides to kill them off when it's determined that he'll only get the money when they're adults. And so he leaves them, locked in a car on a rail-road track with the 11:15 barrelling down on them.

What to do, what to do?

Based on the first three "Unfortunate Events" books ("The Bad Beginning," "The Reptile Room," and "The Wide Window,"), the film is as episodic as could be with the child-endangering machinations of the Count the single unsavory thread running through it. Upon Carrey's every entrance, Silberling takes the wise course of just hanging back, giving Carrey a wide shot (with distorting anamorphic lens) and keeping any other actor out of giggling range. So much of his performance is ad-libbed, you could make the case that it's Carrey who's driving the bus; things calm down considerably when Billy Connolly and Meryl Streep take possession of the children (and the movie), but gears up again when Carrey dervishes his way into the scene (Connolly stays out of his way, but Streep engages him, going eye-to-eye).

It's a good thing, too. "Unfortunate Events" could have turned excessively mordant to the point of leeching all the fun out of it, production-designed into stasis if Carrey wasn't there to break windows (and characters) in the proceedings. In that spirit, the cast is rounded out by such anarchic spirits as Catherine O'Hara, Jennifer Coolidge, Cedric the Entertainer, Dustin Hoffman, Jane Lynch, and Craig Ferguson that flit around the corners to keep things from getting too predictable, and deservedly more than a little off-kilter.


* He started out as the Coen Brothers' cinematographer.

** It's fun when doled out in tea-spoons of dread and low dudgeon, but if you want to hear it overdone, listen to the director and author Daniel Handler's commentary track on the DVD. Handler (as "Lemony Snicket") acts like your staid Aunt Petunia, who goes all-fluttery and horrified at the movie, which is funny for ten minutes, then overstays its welcome...by two hours.

Julie & Julia

"Too Many Cooks Spoil the Froth"

Nora Ephron directed movies have the same half-circle trajectories as "Star Trek" films: you get a good one, the next one stinks. Whether by virtue or vice of over-confidence or coasting, it seems you can't have two good Nora Ephron movies back to back. For every "Sleepless in Seattle," there's a "Mixed Nuts" and for every "You've Got Mail" there's a "Michael."

That's if you're a normal person. For me, I have yet to see an Ephron effort that hasn't made my toes curl inward in their shoes. There's a slap-happy spunkiness to her movies that just make me want to plunge my fore-head into the seat-back in front of me. Her nadir came with her last movie: how in the Hell can somebody screw up "Bewitched?" It wasn't due to the Kidman Komedy Kurse, but a clear case of a writer-director trying too hard, "Bewitched" showed the ruination of tailoring material to attract a star—Jim Carrey as Darren—and then not going back to Square One to re-tool it when they don't get him. Will Farrell could be an astonishingly good Darren, but in another movie, not so driven by his character. And her efforts to make it a one-off "Bewitched" just seemed pitifully neutered—here's a concept where the woman has all the power, and Ephron compromised it. I know a lot of women who were fans of the TV show could not believe how badly the movie botched the premise. They felt betrayed.

Fans of Julia Child and "The French Chef" might feel the same way, but at least the effort was made to make a better film. "Julie & Julia" is based on the book written by Julie Powell cribbed from her Salon.com blog, a breezy chatty thing done for the same reasons as the blog you're currently reading: to write. And the only way to improve your writing is by writing, and then writing more. I don't write about cooking (but I know people who do), and it is that discipline to produce and take stock and put it Out There that (supposedly) makes you better at it, whether it's writing or cooking or (non-committal generality). Sometimes, like Powell, you get an audience, but it doesn't matter: becoming a better (non-committal generality) is what matters. This is my way of giving kudos to Powell, who's gotten a lot of stick lately for a) not being a good cook—she blogged about cooking out of a recipe book (doy!) and b) being successful when there are a lot of food-bloggers out there who aren't (see a).*

Having said that, Ephron made a stupendously wise choice to actually combine Powell's story with that of 1948 Parisian based Julia Child (Meryl Streep) on a parallel course. Both women find themselves tethered and adrift: Julia, after working for the OSS, and married to diplomat/spy Paul Child (Stanley Tucci's best role in years) does not know what to do in Paris other than effuse, and Julie Powell (Amy Adams) finds herself in a bad Queens apartment,** at a bad job (at a post 9/11 Lower Manhattan management company), and with nothing satisfying in her life—her dream of writing a distant memory. JC decides to take cooking classes—in a class entirely of men, while JP decides that since she finds solace in cooking she's going to spend a year following Child's recipes and writing about the experience. Ephron's film then follows the two women through their various experiences until reaching their final triumphs—both of which involve being published.

Good enough. Enticing enough, actually. But, truth to tell, despite the best efforts of the impeccable Amy Adams (trooper that she is—she's perfected a mono-syllabic babble in moments of confusion), the movie just stops being interesting every time we jump to the present day story, probably because that story goes through the Ephron story-grinder—get a goal, have your effervescent highs, have your debilitating lows, but everything works out in the end (Cue Uplifting Standard Song).

The Julia Child sections fare much better because Child was doing something a bit revolutionary and she was a fascinating personality and is played wonderfully well by Meryl Streep. But it's like banging the oven door on the soufflé every time we move away from the past because like a good balloon, you can't take your eyes off something that defiantly floats. That Child has interesting people to play off of—Tucci's husband and, in what might be the acting scene of the year, Streep bouncing off the brilliant Jane Lynch playing her sister—while Adams struggles in relative self-involved*** isolation, might be part of the problem.

But, truth be told, just as Julie falls in love with Julia the person, the audience does, too, and the movie falls victim to its own story; when the person keeps stating over and over what a great person "blank" is, you tend to believe it, even over the person who's stating it. And Streep's Child is far more child-like than the real person, finding the charm in everybody and everything, head-strong and a foot taller than everybody else in the vicinity (they did some careful casting and set design for this), crowing with delight and bouncing in triumph, you can't help but love her...and admire, once yet again, how Streep can take ordinary reactions and make them extraordinary.

"Julie & Julia" is a Rental.

* Not to belabor the point, but look, she did it for self-improvement—that she made a success of it and is surfing her high tide well is just, well...gravy. Or just desserts.

** That I think New Yorkers might kill for.

*** Ephron hammers the "self-involved" blogger bit a might hard considering the number of bloggers and facebookers and Twitterers in her audience (so says this self-involved blogger).

By Request: Adaptation.

"Adaptation." (Spike Jonze, 2002) I love Charlie Kaufman's writing. It reminds me of the old "Twilight Zone" series...but with depth*—but he's more of the Charles Beaumont style of TZ story-telling than Serling's or Richard Matheson's or Earl Hamner Jr.'s. Leaps are made every few minutes beyond the central conceit, and comes to a truly disconcerting kernel of truth at the end, which makes whatever frustrations made during the course of the film worth it. "Being John Malkovich" is a charming deconstruction of personality and wish-fulfillment, and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind " is a jaded cynic's validation of love, and its intrinsic ability to be more than merely a process of instincts, chemistry and firing synapses. What's not to love?

But "Adaptation." is another animal. It's "Charlie Kaufman in crisis," and a bit of a cheat, while also being an ingenious way to solve a problem--that is, writing a screenplay for a book that is, basically, unfilmable. Given the opportunity (and contract) to write a treatment based on Susan Orlean's best-selling book "The Orchid Thief,"** Kaufman readily accepted the job, being attracted to the odd obsessive themes of the book, and found himself unable to translate it into a film-story.

So he wrote about his difficulties translating it into a film-story! The book's subject, John Laroche, the poacher who was seeking the "Ghost Orchid" in the Florida Everglades was a real person who was determined to find the rare flower to clone it and sell it. The screenplay's subject is about Charles Kaufman, screenwriter, who's trying to adapt Susan Orlean's book, "The Orchid Thief," and wrestling with its themes and his own inability to create the screenplay. Impeding his process is his twin, simpler brother Donald (both played by Nicolas Cage), who's decided he's also going to write screenplays--none of which Charlie likes. Susan Orlean figures in it (played by Meryl Streep), as does Laroche—he's the bespectacled fellow pictured to the right, not Chris Cooper's snaggle-toothed, though Oscar-winning, portrayal— but they're fictionalized versions of the real people, adapted to fit a more commercial film. Laroche is using the orchids to make a drug and sell it, hooks Orlean, and she begins a needy affair with him and, fueled by her addiction, becomes as obsessed with the Orchid Thief as much as he's obsessed with the orchids. Is any of that true? No. Are the people real? Yes. The website, Chasing the Frog.com had done a fairly succinct job of separating the fact from fiction here. Yes, these people do exist, as does screen-lecturer Robert McKee,*** but they're fictionalized versions of the real people. Can Kaufman get away with doing that? Yes, he obviously did, but they had to get permission from the real-life counterparts to do so (just as Jonez had to get permission from John Malkovich for Kaufman's "Being John Malkovich" or that would have been a moot project).

Look up the word "Adaptation" in the dictionary. "Any change in the structure or functioning of an organism that makes it better suited to its environment." There couldn't be a better explanation of the screen treatment of "Adaptation." Kaufman couldn't, as they say in the trades, "crack it," so he changed the structure of the scenario...transplanted it, if you will...to make it work as a movie—especially a movie in the current environment of movie-making. And he made the debate between what he wanted to do and what he had to do part of the story in the form of the arguing screenwriting twins, Charles and Donald Kaufman.

Any writer of success must at some point deal with "the Other." The other writer, whose ideas are dismissed and shelved for work accomplished. Steven King did an experiment once to see if his writing would be as successful in other genres as opposed to the "scary fiction" writer, Steven King. So he created a psuedonym, Richard Bachman, much to the consternation of his publisher. Bachman sold well, but King had to deal with the success of his dopplescrivener after several books were published. Ultimately, it inspired the concept of his novel "The Dark Half."

Noms de plume are as old as Bashō (and I'd bet cave paintings had false signatures, as well), and "Adaptation." is credited to both Charlie and Donald Kaufman. Donald Kaufman is the first completely fictional person to be nominated for an Academy Award. Donald also serves as a way for Charles to have conflict while doing something solitary—writing. For all the preciousness of the conceit, it still manages to work in a weirdly clear way, and it provides the means of this exchange, which re-defines the whole picture and sums it up: Donald and Charlie are talking about a time in school when Donald approached a girl he had a crush on, and when his back was turned, she and her gaggle of "Heathers" made fun of him.

 Donald Kaufman: I knew. I heard them.
Charlie Kaufman: How come you looked so happy?
Donald Kaufman: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn't have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.
Charlie Kaufman: But she thought you were pathetic.
Donald Kaufman: That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago.

You are what you love. Not what loves you. For that little gem of a thought—multi-faceted, flawless and fundamental—I have enormous respect for "Adaptation." for all its problems.

The fictional Charles Kaufman—or is it Donald? (Nicolas Cage)
—on-set with the non-fictional Susan Orlean.

Oh, one more thing: My first impression of "Adaptation." was to recall a punch-line from an ancient Warner Brothers cartoon (actually a couple of them, one of them being "Show Biz Bugs," another "Curtain Razor")--but because of what transpires (and the fear that kids would duplicate it) it's not much in circulation anymore. In it, the indefatigably fame-seeking Daffy Duck is auditioning for stage-time for his act. Each one fails miserably and he's rejected. "Next!" Finally, he shows up in a devil's costume. He eats gunpowder. He drinks gasoline and nitro-glycerine. Then...dramatically, he swallows a lit match. BOOM! There's a huge explosion. "That's incredible!" cries the ecstatic agent. "I can book you immediately!" "Yeah yeah," says the ghost of Daffy, drifting heavenward. "But I can only do it once!"


For Ned, who asked...on July 9th, 2008

* There are others who take that switcheroo-based style of writing, including M. Night Shamyalan, and Alejandro Amenábar.

**You can read the original Laroche article here, at Orlean's web-site.

***McKee suggested Brian Cox (the original Hannibal Lecter) to play him in the movie. Good suggestion, actually.