(click here for part one)
Thursday evening arrives and, sporting a spanky new haircut, I get caught in heavy rush-hour traffic heading over to Berkeley and barely make it to the grand, old California Theater before the screening is scheduled to start. Word of mouth spreads fast in a college town, and the cavernous venue is sold out. A long line of 18-to-26-year-olds waits outside anyway on the odd chance that there’ll be leftover seats. I’m way late by now but see the PR guy, who ushers me in as if I’m Harvey Weinstein. The lobby is buzzing with youngsters saying things to each other like “Dude, you got in!! Did Rolf get in?!” And I realize that these indie kids have been weaned on “Malkovich” the way my generation was on “Blue Velvet” and “Repo Man” and “Stranger than Paradise.”
After being shown to the cordoned-off press and VIP row, I get back up to buy popcorn, maybe a Coke too. Should I be buying popcorn? Will it seem unprofessional? There’s no way Anthony Lane makes a popcorn run. But I’m really hungry. I hold off on the soda, though. Can’t be seen sitting in press row with both hands full of concessions.
Back at my seat, the huge theater bristles with excited murmurs. I take notes about popcorn appropriateness. My mouth is dry. Popcorn with no soda, what exactly was I thinking? A middle-aged (and by middle-aged I mean 48-56, thankyouverymuch) woman leans over, asks “Are you a critic?” I tell her that I write for a magazine, but no, I’m not a critic. “So you write about films but don’t criticize them.” I consider explaining the concept of the preview/feature article, but then just say “Yes, precisely,” and turn back to my notes, where I write a version of this very paragraph as she peers over my shoulder for a moment before zeroing in on her next target.
After a few minutes, the lights dim, and Berkeley English prof Kamilla Elliott gets on a mike and introduces the film to hoots and whistles from the revved-up crowd.
The audience laughs hard all the way through the film and offers a robust ovation when it’s over. Then Spike and Charlie are trotted out to the front of the theater for a horribly awkward and ultimately out of control Q&A session. Kaufman and Jonze are extremely uncomfortable. They seem want to show their appreciation of their audience, but hate answering questions, often refusing to, in fact. (At one point, Spike passes his mike to a guy in the front row after a particularly convoluted query, saying, “Here, you handle this one.”) Soon, people in the crowd just start randomly yelling questions and comments, and even yelling at each other to the tune of, “Why don’t you just watch the movie again, moron!” I find myself worrying about Spike and Charlie and don’t know how the publicists can let this get so out of hand. A couple of them finally jump in and end it, secreting Spike and Charlie out a side door. Clearly, they’ll just be dying to talk to me tomorrow.
During the Q&A in Berkeley, a man in the back stood up and shouted, “I really loved your movie until it got to the last half hour and then it was all full of clichés and crap.” Some people will indeed hate last act of “Adaptation” because of its self- consciousness and seeming self-contradiction and an irony bordering on cynicism. In the film, during his initial meeting with the producer who wants him to adapt Orlean’s book, Charlie says, “I just don’t want to ruin it by making it a Hollywood thing. I don’t want to cram in sex or guns or car chases or characters overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end.” In essence, the quasi-fictional Charlie wants exactly what the heckler wanted, what we all want: no “clichés and crap.” And thus, in the name of satire, Spike and Charlie cram all that good stuff into the last half hour of their film.
In “Adaptation’s” early going, the fictive Charlie rails against these very sins of Hollywood, and while we as audience laugh at his pedantic extremity, we pretty much agree with Charlie because it’s a Spike Jonze movie we’ve come to see, after all – we’re all “indie” film fans here and we do bemoan how Tinseltown has ruined cinema. But just when we’ve gotten comfy with “Adaptation,” it pulls the rug out from under us in a whirlwind, take-no-prisoners last act by indulging in every single one of those clichés, as characters do indeed overcome obstacles to succeed in the end.
We are repulsed by these Hollywood clichés, the real life Charlie K. seems to be saying, but we also love them, or at least need them – plots need them, and people, especially fictive people, do often require trauma to change or grow, and for a movie to move us, someone has to change or grow. (If this essay were comparable to “Adaptation,” I’d now write, “just as orchids grow from inconsequential weeds into lush, miraculous objects of desire.” The movie takes just such risks and pulls them off quite miraculously indeed.)
The man who shouted from the back of the theater just wasn’t getting it. “Adaptation” may be faulted for its ambition, for trying to contain Whitmanesque multitudes of contradiction, but not for the clichés themselves. The film’s great achievement is to show the necessity of just such contradiction – cynicism and romanticism duking it out, flagrant insipidness and the subtlest originality side by side, and Hollywood and Art hand in hand and toe to toe.
That said, I’ll step off my soapbox. My wise and generous editorial-minded friends have all agreed that I shouldn’t bother talking about the movie at all, that this essay is about me and my experience, but I just couldn’t resist. But let’s get back on track.
* * *
By this point, I’ve spent a week immersed in Spike and Charlie and Orlean and Laroche (the actual orchid thief who’s the focus of the book). I’ve seen the movie twice, I’ve watched its writer and director squirm in front of a couple thousand fans. I’ve envied them, I’ve felt like a fan, I’ve tried to feel like a journalist, I’ve even felt vaguely like a peer (if on a different scale – as they say, fame is just real life with a lot more people watching). Tomorrow, I’ll meet them, I’ll sit in a room with just a few other people and talk to them, listen to them. I’ll ask them professional and literate questions, and they will answer with more or less interest, and that will be that.
I watch the last scene of “Malkovich” one more time, jot down a few questions, lay out my favorite shirt, cords, shoes, and go to bed.
(to be continued)
