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2002: The Year in Movies

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from: David Edelstein
to: Roger Ebert, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott

Adapt or Die

Posted Friday, Jan. 3, 2003, at 6:48 PM ET

Who are these people?

Sarah:

That was a ravishing defense of Adaptation: Charlie Kaufman should send you orchids. I'm with you pretty much until your clincher:

4) At last, realizing near the end that the chasm between the twins is shrinking: poignant bitter-sweetness. Though still an idiot, Donald has proven himself generous enough to deserve Charlie's gratitude. With Donald's generosity as an example, Charlie can begin to realize that all his crippling worry about integrity hasn't just kept him from writing a decent word—it's turned him into a selfish ass, and bulldozed his life.

At its best I don't think Adaptation is about Kauffman's cleverness, or meta-wizardry, or even originality versus Hollywood selling out. Writer's block is, at bottom, about inaction versus action, endlessly self-measuring worry versus the flow that comes when you choose to live. The Charlie Kauffman of the film's first half is a pitiable monster; Donald is the moronic angel who helps turn him back into a man. That he does so with hack strategies—obvious structure, low expectations—makes it no less of a rescue.

Here is, I'm afraid, where YOUR movie is better than Charlie's. I can't accept that "Charlie Kaufman" has "chosen to live," even though a case has been made to that effect in the film. He has participated in (and written) a ludicrous, third-rate scenario that represents, as Roger has said, the sort of climax that Hollywood executives like to slap onto unfinished movies before or after they're disastrously test-screened. The idea that Kaufman's obsession with integrity has kept him from life isn't dramatized, unless you mean the life represented by his agent. ("I'd fuck HER in the ass.") His failure to make it with his English friend is a consequence of timidity and self-hatred, not integrity; and if Donald's brashness inspires him to seize the day, well, that's about the oldest scenario (nerd-becomes-a-winner) in the Hollywood playbook.

I think you're right when you suggest that Kaufman ultimately sees writer's block as a failure to live—and he is smart enough to discern in Robert McKee's exhortations something more than formula storytelling rules. (This is made clear in the scene in which McKee suggests that anyone who can't find anything to write about in a time like ours is, in effect, too self-involved.) But here is where the movie confuses me. If "embracing life" means writing a stupid cornball final act that has little to do thematically (I don't care WHAT you say on this point, Tony) with anything that has preceded it, it doesn't signal that "Charlie" has gone from a monster to a man. It suggests that "Charlie" has become a Hollywood monster.

This, I guess, is what I meant by not having the intellect (or, frankly, the will) to penetrate all those layers of irony.

Have a good weekend, folks. Roger, I hope you do make a cameo appearance next week. And y'all keep those cards and letters coming.

David

the movie club
entries
1234567891011121314151617181920
from: David Edelstein
to: Roger Ebert, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott

Adapt or Die

Posted Friday, Jan. 3, 2003, at 6:48 PM ET
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Roger Ebert is the Chicago Sun-Times' film critic. David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. You can e-mail him at . Sarah Kerr is Vogue's film critic. A.O. Scott is a film critic at the New York Times.
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Notes From The Fray Editor:

The Movie Club Fray has been busy adding to and subtracting from the critics' lists (additions: Ararat, The Two Towers, Jackass; subtractions: Minority Report, anything that hasn't been in wide release, The Pianist). One item of note: critics should entertain gender-switched hypotheticals at their own peril. Ebert's feminized Igby reminds pnuge of Wish You Were Here; Edelstein's Man-Hours reminds DeaH of American Beauty. jknyc tracks down Ebert's Howard Hawks reference. There is also a smart Spielberg thread—that is, one about narrative and character development and not the omnipresent "bad dad"—here, with seanweitner, simparker and Rachel doing most of the bandying.

Remarks From The Fray:

The reason I felt betrayed by Adaptation's climax was because, just as Mr. Ebert claims, it was thumbing its nose at the members of the audience who didn't understand how "brave" it was. That's a pretty damning criticism from one of the movie's admirers. It's okay to thumb your nose at the start of such a movie--pre-empt criticism, confound expectation, etc. But by the end you should be making a movie for those in the audience who DO understand how brave you are. The best possible ending for this film would have been a true compromise, an actual adaptation by Kaufman; or, on the other hand, as un-McKee an ending as possible, something that Kaufman truly loved. If he was writing the ending for someone who didn't understand the rest of the movie, then it's understandable that I, who liked the rest of the movie, felt so alienated.

Worth it, however, for that gorgeous final time-lapse shot. Most elegant time-lapse photography since Boys Don't Cry.

-- simparker

(To reply, click here.)

"Can you imagine the outcry if Igby had been a teenage girl and her lover the 40-year-old best friend of her father?"

That sounds a lot like David Leland's "Wish You Were Here".

-- pnuge

(To reply, click here.)

Mr. Edelstein says that a man making the same choice as the woman in The Hours would be looked upon as a monstrous coward. It really wasn't too many years ago that Kevin Spacey won an Oscar for playing a man who made just that same choice. His character is seen as liberated for choosing to get high and lust after a rose-covered teen. Mentally, at least, he left his wife and children to live for the first time until he, ironically wasn't alive anymore.

-- DeaH

(To reply, click here.)

The quote about Hawks being enjoyable was in the Sunday NY TIMES Book Review section in a review on Elmore Leonard. [It is; here. The review is by Salon's Charles Taylor and he is citing Robin Wood.—Fray Ed.]

-- jknyc

(To reply, click here.)

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