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Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman is a very strange guy, as his scripts will attest. He can't do anything in a straightforward fashion. Given the chance to adapt a pleasant little non-fiction book about flowers called The Orchid Thief from Susan Orlean, a writer for the New Yorker, Kaufman instead uses the book as a springboard for a wild fantastical nightmare about purging his own personal demons. The result, Adaptation, is something Orlean could never have dreamed, and probably sat dumbfounded the first time she saw. Rather than just cut and paste the story from the book to the screen, Kaufman instead wrote a movie about himself, Charlie Kaufman, tormented screenwriter struggling to adapt Orlean's book. Kaufman the screenwriter wrote a script about Kaufman the screenwriter writing a script, which in turn tells the story of Susan Orlean writing a book that features herself. Can a film get much more meta-textual than that?

Did I mention that the movie stars Nicolas Cage as Charlie Kaufman as well as his (fictional) identical twin brother Donald, who may or may not be a figment of his imagination? Donald is also a screenwriter, the less-struggling kind who is having no trouble at all churning out a piece of genre hackwork called "The 3", a cheesy thriller about a serial killer with multiple personalities (and if you think his pitch sounds too laughably inane to ever get produced, check out a movie called Identity that was released a few months after this film).

All this, and the movie still manages to be a real adaptation of the Susan Orlean book, cramming in all the key points of The Orchid Thief in a lyrical, literate fashion before spinning them off into all sorts of wild tangents. Meryl Streep plays Orlean in one of the few performances of her career that doesn't call for her to put on an annoying fake accent. The ever-reliable Chris Cooper is also on hand in an enormously fun role as the white trash horticultural genius who is the basis for The Orchid Thief. And as the two Kaufmans, the self- loathing, cynical Charlie and the haplessly naïve Donald, Cage in turn delivers two of the best performances he's ever likely to manage.

Adaptation is a fabulous, invigorating film, rich with meaning and interpretation. Yes, it's even "psychologically taut". No short plot summary can ever do justice to its crazy flights of imagination, that literally take us from the dawn of time up through to the very second that the script itself is being written. It's a movie about adaptation in multiple senses of the word, from the way that plants adapt to their environment, the way that books are adapted into screenplays, or the way that people adapt to their circumstances or the expectations of others.

In one of my favorite nuances, Charlie is constantly complaining that film scripts rarely depict real life, that real people don't change or go through dramatic character arcs. The movie in part reflects this. A character like Donald, for example, starts out as comic relief, a bumbling loser and the antithesis of all the values Charlie strives for. Yet over time Charlie's understanding of Donald grows and evolves. Although Donald himself doesn't change much throughout the course of the movie, eventually we come to realize that he has been a thoughtful, intelligent and even talented guy the whole time. Likewise, screenwriting guru Robert McKee (another terrific performance from Brian Cox, here playing another real person who was very brave to lend the use of his name in this movie) is initially introduced as an arrogant con artist, a charlatan bilking desperate writers with his simplistic rules about how to make it big. He certainly doesn't change any in his few moments on screen, but eventually Charlie finds genuine help and insight in his guidance. The people don't change, but our perceptions of them do.

Other things do change, of course, and as it sweeps into its last act the movie turns into the very things it swears it won't, namely a formula thriller with drugs, guns, car chases, plot twists, outrageous character shifts, and a monumental deus-ex-machina contrivance. It becomes exactly the kind of movie Donald would have wanted it to be. This is all done with great deliberation and irony, but Kaufman and director Spike Jonze resist the easy punch-line. The more ridiculous the movie's plot becomes, the straighter they play it, avoiding the expected big twist finale and leaving the ending a conundrum sure to frustrate as many viewers as it rewards those who have been paying attention.

I must admit that I have never considered Being John Malkovich, the first collaboration between Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, the most brilliant thing in the history of cinema, as some prominent critics called it. Although reasonably clever and fairly amusing, quite frankly the movie often felt like a desperate Terry Gilliam knock-off. Nonetheless, Adaptation, though it is clearly the work of the same people who made Malkovich and shares much thematically and stylistically in common with that film, is also clearly a work of tremendous growth and originality, and is in every way the better picture. In fact, it was easily the best picture released in 2002. If not the Greatest Thing Ever, it comes damn close.

Video: How Does The Disc Look?

Adaptation is, like Panic Room and Punch Drunk Love, one of Columbia TriStar's fake Superbit DVD releases. I call it a fake Superbit because it is perfectly apparently that this disc did not go into production under any pretense of being a genuine Superbit release. When the studio realized that they weren't going to have any "added value content" supplemental materials to put on the disc, they decided, "Hey, let's slap a DTS track on there and call it a Superbit". Other than the presence of DTS audio, in most other respects the disc does not meet the criteria set by previous Superbit releases. Its case artwork does not have the big silver border design, the disc has animated menus (a Superbit no-no), and the compression quality of the picture transfer doesn't seem to be much better than average.

The 1.85:1 anamorphically enhanced image is sharp with strong textural detail and vibrant colors. Like all Columbia TriStar discs, minor edge enhancement is present, most visible around printed text, though on the whole is it less intrusive than on many Columbia titles. In its best scenes the movie genuinely looks terrific. However, stylistically the film has patches of intentionally rough-looking footage, and there are a number of scenes with heavy visible grain. The digital compression is mostly adequate during these scenes, but there are surprising compression problems considering the disc's Superbit pedigree. Fine details in the image sometimes blur during complex images and some shots are swimming with compression grain (not real photographic grain).

I suppose if we want to argue semantics, all the Superbit branding specifically promises is that the disc will have a high average bit-rate, but it has also always been implied that Superbit discs would be mastered with more attention paid to the compression quality. The actual bit- rate number is meaningless; what is important is the quality of the compression work. Adaptation may maintain a high average numerical rate but the quality of the compression work still has noticeable flaws. This isn't to say that it looks terrible by any means. In fact, for the most part it looks great. But for a disc branded with the Superbit logo it does not live up to its potential. It is barely better than average for the DVD format, and there are plenty of non- Superbit titles from this studio or others that look as good or better.

Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

To qualify as a Superbit, a DVD must have a DTS track, so Adaptation gets one by default. The film's sound design is professionally done and has interesting elements, but it is not a showy mix and there is little audible difference between the provided Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1 sound options.

In many scenes, especially those set in swamps, the movie has aggressive surround ambience, yet whiz-bang separation effects are few until the last half-hour, where the mix becomes a little more active. The track is well recorded and mixed, and is presented with good fidelity. The two car crash scenes have the deep bass hits you'd expect from them, and some of the musical score also digs deep into the lower registers. I have no problems with the way the soundtrack is presented in either 5.1 sound option. Still, there is little here that begs for DTS. That track's presence seems like more of a contractual obligation than a real necessity.

A Dolby 2.0 surround option has also been provided, along with a French dub in Dolby 2.0, both in clear contradiction of the Superbit mandate (why are they wasting valuable disc space with these?). English and French subtitles are available, as is true Closed Captioning.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

Also a violation of the Superbit program's rules is the fact that this disc contains two bonus features. They aren't anything elaborate, just a Theatrical Trailer and some Filmographies, but their presence at all proves that the disc wasn't always intended to be a Superbit. For what it's worth, the trailer is anamorphically enhanced and the filmographies include a bio for Donald Kaufman.

DVD-ROM Exclusives: What do you get when you pop the disc in your PC?

There are no ROM extras on the disc.

Parting Thoughts

As I see it, Adaptation is the type of movie best enjoyed from the comfort of home video. Unless you happened to catch it with a particularly open-minded audience in a small art theater, a film this quirky and original tends to provoke divisive reactions from many viewers. I recall hearing nothing but grumbling and complaints as I left the theater where I first saw it. This isn't a movie likely to be enjoyed by the type of yokel who thought that, say, Troop Beverly Hills was some sort of cinematic masterwork. I'd rather watch it again at home than put up with that.