August 16 2026, 08:47

Adaptation

Director: Spike Jonze

Release year: 2002

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman has writer’s block trying to adapt a bestselling book, The Orchid Thief. He is obsessed with doing the book justice and not letting down the author, New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean. Charlie’s happy-go-lucky twin brother, Donald, is temporarily living with him. Donald decides to enrol on a screenwriting course and write his own screenplay. Donald’s success while Charlie continues to anxiously suffer in all areas of his life brings everything to a head.

This is a classic Charlie Kaufman meta-story, with Nicolas Cage playing the screenwriter protagonist as an agonisingly self-loathing creature whose head is filled with a continuous stream of self-doubt and disgust. He struggles to connect with people, and can’t bring himself to share his feelings of love for friend Amelia. In a parallel story, Susan Orlean is writing about orchid specialist John Laroche, and she goes with him into the swamps of Florida to find a rare ghost orchid.

As things unfurl, we see that Charlie is actually writing the screenplay of the film we are watching, and that Susan Orlean and John Laroche are his versions of the people in the book he’s adapting. Susan is in a lonely marriage, creatively empty, disappointed with her life, and she becomes jealous of Laroche’s power to become fascinated with anything he decides to. Laroche gets her hooked on a drug he can create from the ghost orchid, leading to a thriller-like ending

As painful as it is to watch Charlie torture himself, it’s worth it for the eventual connection he establishes with Donald, his creative opposite. Donald is like Laroche, free-spirited and deluded, and Charlie is like Susan, lonely and lost. To create something original, you need to find balance between opposites – being true to ideas and thinking about the audience; crippling perfectionism and ridiculous bravado. The path is delicate. It’s a miracle anything good gets made. But the path is also robust. If you listen to your intuition and the characters inside yourself, you can’t really go wrong.

(The real-life Susan Orlean really did write The Orchid Thief, and this film is Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of it, showing just how far you can take an adaptation.)

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