Indians in Adaptation

Adaptation (Superbit Collection) (2003)Twisty brilliance from screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze, the team who created Being John Malkovich. Nicolas Cage returns to form with a funny, sad, and sneaky performance as Charlie Kaufman, a self-loathing screenwriter who has been hired to adapt Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief into a screenplay. Frustrated and infatuated by Orlean's elegant but plotless book (which is largely a rumination on flowers), Kaufman begins to write a screenplay about himself trying to write a screenplay about The Orchid Thief, all the while hounded by his twin brother Donald (Cage again), who's cheerfully writing the kind of formulaic action movie that Kaufman finds repugnant. By its conclusion, Adaptation is the most artistically ambitious, most utterly cynical, and most uncategorizable movie ever to come out of Hollywood. Also starring Meryl Streep (as Susan Orlean), Chris Cooper, Tilda Swinton, and Brian Cox; superb performances throughout. --Bret FetzerThe Native aspects of Adaptation:

AdaptationThe title "Adaptation" is a play on words. Kaufman is struggling to write an adaptation of Susan Orleans's "The Orchid Thief," while her book is--among other things--a study of how orchids have exemplified Darwinian adaptation. As a New Yorker writer, she decided to write her book after learning about the trial of John Laroche and three Seminole Indians in Florida. They had stolen orchids, a protected flora, from a swamp on the Seminole reservation. At his trial, Laroche claims that the Indians are exempt from such laws. In the film, Kaufman puts Orleans's story into the background and focuses on his own struggle to adapt such unwieldy material--at least to him--into a viable film. He depicts himself as an obsessed, neurotic failure, while Orleans (Meryl Streep) and Laroche (Chris Cooper) are transformed into fictional characters with only thin connections to the real people. Ultimately, this is not a film about Seminoles and orchids as much as it is about aesthetics.And:The one thing that Kaufman does not seem all that interested in is something that interests me a great deal, namely the troubled interconnections between American Indians, ecology, Darwinism and the flower market. If it was up to me, I would have made the three Indians who were caught with Laroche into the lead characters and put everybody else into the background, most of all Charlie Kaufman.Comment:  What do Jay Tavare, Litefoot, Roger Willie, and Gary Farmer have in common? Nothing, except they're Native actors who played Seminole Indians in Adaptation.

Tavare, Litefoot, and Willie are billed 5th through 7th on IMDB.com, while Farmer is billed 12th. But I must say I didn't remember the Indians in Adaptation. Apparently they didn't make much of an impression.

Like Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation is strange--unlike anything else in Hollywood--and brilliant. Not necessarily great, mind you, but brilliant. When I saw this movie, I thought it had to win the Oscar for Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay. (Alas, it was nominated but lost to The Pianist.)

Many critics have said the big blockbuster ending hurts Adaptation. I agree. I was going to give Adaptation a very high rating but the ending lowered it. Still, it's well worth seeing.

My ratings for the Charlie Kaufman movies I've seen:

Being John Malkovich--7.0
Adaptation--8.0
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--8.0

For more on Adaptation, see the Wikipedia entry and Roger Ebert's review. For more on the subject in general, see The Best Indian Movies.