Review – Adaptation

As with Being John Malkovich, this production depends almost entirely on its own quirkiness. The story is standard writer-with-writer’s-block stuff, the story-within-a-story (the book the writer is supposed to be turning into a screenplay) is about a writer with the New Yorker working on a story about an obsessive orchid hunter. There’s a lot of ennui, alienation, et cetera, et cetera. A paragraph-review description can’t help but make the production sound silly, even somewhat masturbatory in a guy-writing-the-screenplay-of-his-own-life way. And in at least some ways this movie is just that. But a simple description sells the movie short, because its charm lies in the little twists and turns, the small visual tricks, the details rather than the bigger picture. I’m not sure that it works for the whole running time, but there’s enough fun here and there to keep it at least close to interesting. Mildly amusing