Grade: A-

Verdict: Exhilaratingly smart and more fun than any movie has a right to be.

Details: Starring Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper and Brian Cox. Directed by Spike Jonze. Rated R for language, sexuality, some drug use and violent images. One hour, 54 minutes.

See it: Local theaters and showtimes for Adaptation

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: "Adaptation" is the most gleefully clever movie of the year. Since we're only 10 days into 2003, that's easy enough to say. But the same goes for 2002, which is when it first was shown, and that was a year filled with wonderful films.

It's about passion, loneliness, rare orchids, Hollywood movies and writer's block. And it's about adaptation, in life and in art. In the world according to Darwin, you adapt or die. In the world according to Hollywood, you adapt or disappear.

This much is true: While making "Being John Malkovich," which Charlie Kaufman wrote, he was hired to adapt "The Orchid Thief," a nonfiction best seller by Susan Orlean, a writer at The New Yorker.

Orlean's elliptical ruminations ranged from the perilous history of orchid hunting to why a scraggly backwater Floridian named John Laroche --- an orchid breeder/poacher missing his front teeth --- is so darn attractive. (The answer is provided by Chris Cooper, whose portrayal of Laroche is a career high.) She also waxed eloquent on the nature of passion, admitting that, though "passion is not in my constitution," she did have one passion: "I wanted to want something as much as people wanted these plants."

Translation? "The Orchid Thief" was almost impossible to translate into a movie. So Kaufman made a movie about adapting the unadaptable.

As Kaufman, Nicolas Cage presents himself as a slumped-over depressive whose daily mantra of self-loathing includes the words fat, bald, ugly and loser. When he sits down to start his script, he dreams of banana-nut muffins and lacerates himself for not having an original thought in his head. (His bald head, he adds.)

Charlie also has a twin brother (maybe) named Donald (also Cage), who is everything he's not. An easygoing, confident and essentially good-hearted dolt, Donald is a font of optimism and bad writing. But it's his hack script about a serial killer with multiple personalities that gets picked up for six figures.

In a lunch meeting with a studio exec (Tilda Swinton), Charlie haltingly blurts out that he wants to honor the book, which he finds brilliant and moving. "I don't want to cram in sex or guns or car chases. You know? Or characters learning profound life lessons."

Yet, in its freak-out third act --- which either works for you or doesn't --- that's precisely what happens. Orlean (Meryl Streep) transgresses the reporter/subject relationship. As Charlie stalls out creatively, his story revs up into a Kaufman-created delirium of wild sex, drugs and alligators (directed with great relish by Spike Jonze, who also helmed "Being John Malkovich").

Before that, the Orlean/Laroche story follows the book. Trips to flower shows or the swamp where Laroche used a legal loophole to steal a rare ghost orchid. Long, rambling conversations in his beat-up van that vacillate between the ludicrous and the profound. Laroche, it turns out, is the ultimate adapter (as is, in his way, Donald).

Cage hasn't been this loose and light on his feet since "Face/Off," another doubles trick, or "Leaving Las Vegas," for which he won an Oscar. And his joyful authority is infectious. In one of the best supporting performances of the year, Streep is nimble, elegant and hilarious. Her high after snorting orchid dust ranks up there with something out of "Reefer Madness" or Johnny Depp's tripping in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

In one of the other best supporting performances of the year, Cooper nails that persuasive and often irresistible redneck swagger you can find in the West Virginia mountains, the Georgia pine forests or the Florida swamps. He's a rascal, a charmer. He's also a bit deranged and even a little dangerous.

In a sense, "Adaptation" is as raffish and mutable as Laroche. It's the sort of movie that keeps reinventing itself and nudging us in the ribs as it does. You'll want to see it soon, because everyone you know will be talking about it.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, (none)