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45
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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
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73
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xx
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29
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66
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59
More Than a Game
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34
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My One and Only
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xx
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Paper Heart
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Play the Game
77
Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire
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76
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79
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40
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69
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64
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74
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69
World's Greatest Dad
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xx
You, the Living
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Adaptation
Universal acclaim
Based on 40 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 82 votes
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by:
Charlie Kaufman
Donald Kaufman
Susan Orlean (book The Orchid Thief)
Directed by: Spike Jonze
Release Date:
Theatrical: December 6, 2002
DVD: May 20, 2003
Running Time: 114 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for language, sexuality, some drug use and violent images
Starring Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Cara Seymour, Rheagan Wallace, Brian Cox, John Cusack, and Judy Greer
The lives of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Cage), author Susan Orlean (Streep) and orchid poacher John Laroche (Cooper) become strangely intertwined as each one's search for passion collides with the others' in this adaptation of the best-selling "The Orchid Thief." (Columbia Pictures)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Where the Wild Things Are
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
In a larger sense, Adaptation is a movie about the simple act of enjoying life -- of really embracing it -- without constantly worrying about what others think.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
Surely the most creative trick of the year and grimly funny throughout.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Screenwriting this smart, inventive, passionate and rip-roaringly funny is a rare species. It's magic.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
It's typical of the nerve, the bravado, the sheer giddy playfulness and sense of fun that characterize what has to be the boldest and most imaginative studio film of the year.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
Kaufman strikes just the right balance between playfulness and sincerity, leaping freely from one absurd situation to another before pulling back on the reins.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
What a bewilderingly brilliant and entertaining movie this is.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
May not be the first movie to examine the creative process. But it's the most playfully brilliant.
Read Full Review >Newsweek David Ansen
An inspired flight of fancy, an oddly poignant examination of the creative process, a rumination on adaptation (orchids to their environment, books to the screen and misfits like Charlie to life) and, in its ultimate irony, a story in which our hero learns a life-altering lesson.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Like no movie before it, Adaptation risks everything -- its cool, its credibility, its very soul -- to expose the horror of making art for the business of entertainment.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Dana Stevens
I realize that the fear of contracting writer's block from a fictional character is crazy, but in the brilliantly scrambled, self-consuming world of Adaptation it has a certain plausibility.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
For three-fourths of its journey, Adaptation is, for my money, the movie of the year: an incredibly audacious and original exercise that challenges the conventions of moviemaking and stretches the boundaries of fiction -- almost, but not quite, to the breaking point.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
The notion of meta has never been diddled more mega than in this giddy Möbius strip of a movie, a contrivance so whizzy and clever that even when it tangles at the end, murked like swampy southwestern Florida itself, the stumble has quotation marks around it.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
A highly enjoyable failure, a quandary that can't resolve itself.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Ella Taylor
Adaptation is hardly profound, but it's one of the most soulful and loopily romantic movies I've seen all year.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine Peter Rainer
Spellbindingly original -- Like the wild orchid, Adaptation is a marvel of adaptation, entwined with its hothouse environment and yet stunningly unique.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
Adaptation's success in engaging the audience in the travails of creating a screenplay is extraordinary.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
All but stealing the film is Cooper, who seizes a rare opportunity as an extroverted, rather than buttoned-up, character to bust loose like an uncaged alligator.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Probably the ultimate writers' film, but it's also a brash, daring, and dynamic film -- as delicate as an orchid but as durable and malleable as the species.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Duelling roles are an actor's dream, and Cage takes full advantage. He and that face of his -- hang-dog homely one minute, vibrantly macho the next -- are perfectly cast. So is Streep as the sophisticated Manhattanite drawn into a steamy realm of Southern discomfort.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
There's only one proper Hollywood ending to this story. Next year, Charlie and the surreal "Donald" Kaufman (listed as co-writers in the playful credits) should win twin Oscars for best adapted screenplay. They've earned it -- really.
Read Full Review >New York Post Jonathan Foreman
The final result, shaped by the brilliantly nimble, pitch-perfect direction of Spike Jonze, and blessed by superb acting, is an extraordinarily clever comedy that falters only in the last 20 minutes.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
It's a testament to Cage's canny performance and Jonze's seamless use of special effects that you believe Charlie and Donald are two entirely different people.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Kim Morgan
You have to experience the thing to understand its simultaneous recklessness and care, its humor and sadness in the name of failure, its playful but dismal take on formulaic Hollywood endings.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
One of the best movies Hollywood has ever made about itself, a extraordinary meta-narrative that continually questions its own ability to capture human experience, disappointment and uneventful loneliness. It's hilariously funny.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker David Denby
The trouble with experimental comedies is that it's often impossible to figure out how to end them. But at least this one is intricate fun before it blows itself up. [9 December 2002, p. 142]
Film Threat Clint Morris
Infinitely impractical, consistently unique and vastly imaginative.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Adaptation, like "Being John Malkovich" before it, is far from a well-made film, even on its own flaky terms. But it's a brave, sometimes brilliant one, with a phantasmagoric ending, full of love and hope, that defeats prose description. Never was an adaptation more original.
Time Richard Schickel
The movie ends in a burst of violence that we are unprepared for and don't believe. Maybe it's the film's final joke. It's a miscalculation -- though a calculated one -- but it does not erase one's fond memories of all the odd, deeply humorous behavior that preceded it.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Snags on the fact that neither story depicted -- not Kaufman's and especially not Orlean's -- is enough to sustain more than an incidental interest.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jami Bernard
Streep is perfect, as per usual, but the showy orchid role goes to Cage in an Oscar-worthy tour de force. He pours his body into Charlie's slumped frame of mind and creates a character churning with endearing contradictions -- the unforgettable nebbish.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
An occasionally maddening and sometimes brilliant motion picture that varies between being insightfully sharp and insufferably self-indulgent. Regardless of whether you appreciate the movie or not, it's likely to stay with you.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
Adaptation is sort of like the mythical Ourabouros mentioned in the screenplay -- the snake that eats its own tail -- or like a series of mirrors repeating their images to infinity.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is like a Ferris wheel--the ride's enjoyable but you've gone nowhere once it's over.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
I'm not turning cartwheels over Adaptation as energetically as my colleagues. Part of me -- and I'm thinking aloud here, I've likely been infected by Kaufman's comic self-consciousness, and also by his meta-comic impulse to draw attention to that self-consciousness, and probably also by his meta-meta-comic impulse to draw attention to drawing attention to his self-consciousness -- that -- that --
Read Full Review >USA Today Mike Clark
Even at its best, Adaptation is one of the movie year's most esoteric outings -- more so than even Paul Thomas Anderson's far superior "Punch-drunk Love." Too smart to ignore but a little too smugly superior to like, this could be a movie that ends up slapping its target audience in the face by shooting itself in the foot.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Rick Kisonak
At the end of the day, though, this is Charlie Kaufman's movie and I'm not sure he proves quite the visionary puppetmaster many in the media are making him out to be.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
The real joke is that the picture's most conventional elements, the superbly acted entanglement between the complicated Orlean and the boastful but unexpectedly thoughtful Laroche, would have made a compelling movie all by themselves -- if written by someone other than Charlie Kaufman.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky
The most overrated movie of the year (of all time?) by people who should know better.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
Virtually everything that happens in Adaptation is almost juvenile showing off - daring to make a film that is in search of a script.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.4 (out of 10) based on 82 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
N K gave it a10:
People who think this was poorly written are not paying attention! Kaufman gets as close as any masterpiece I've known to expressing something true and simple and universal. The humor and wit are clever (I get the "winking at the audience" part), but beyond being playful, they are executed with such a steady and deliberate hand to lend to a greater, troubling problem of how to survive -- to preserve our uniquely human consciousness -- in an era of mass-production. Fantastic, reflexive and self-indulgent? Yes. And yet! It still issues a "message" (for unfortunate lack of better word) relevant to the world we live in. This is a film you can watch repeatedly and find something new every time.
Brian M gave it a9:
Great Movie...Chris Cooper is Great!!
Evin C gave it an8:
The movie came in strong in the beginning and middle. But as it ended, the trick of the film just became too much a part of the film. Right when the film took the "disaster Hollywood" i understood what Kaufman was doing already. But it went on only for so long.
luke b gave it a10:
A brilliant film, quite possibly my favorite film, it is beyond me why anyone can give this flick 0/10, i say they either lack the intelligence to appreciate an innovative creation or they should stick to predictable and simple flicks and avoid anything a bit different or challenging. This film has it all, great acting, cage and cooper give oscar worthy performances, i'm glad cooper got best supporting actor but why cage didn't get best actor is beyond me, this is his best performance, well at least in the films i've seen him in. Spike Jonze delivers stunning cinematography with an equally engaging narrative. This film is both comic and profoundly moving at the same time. being John Malcovich is a very good film, don't get me wrong but this is better, this is superb. Also look out for the countless in jokes mocking the conventional, predictable hollywood films. Especially the scene with Swinton and cage, Michael Clayton starring Tilda Swinton is an epitome of the kind of flick cage is trying to avoid making his screenplay like.
Susie K. gave it a0:
I tried to like this film, but I couldn't even finish it. My best friend loved it. I reckon it depends upon your taste. I found it very boring, I couldn't sympathize or care about any of the characters, and, in trying too hard to be artsy, it ends up being irritating and too dang long (I am not sure how much of it I saw, but my guess is about 2/3 to 3/4 before I got really fed up and quit watching).
Mike F. gave it a9:
Just shy of genius. Let's say extremely, extremely good. The last joke goes on way too long, which is unfortunate. Still, one of my top ten films of all time, up there with The Royal Tenenbaums and The Big Lebowski. It's fine with me if you disliked it (and disliked Tenenbaums/Lebowski) -- I've never had a mainstream sense of humor, so I know that if I love a movie, and find it hilarious, I may be in the minority. Who cares? Those of you who don't like it can go watch Lord of the Rings.
Mike G. gave it a3:
This movie makes me imagine a middle school writing class. The students are asked to write about their favorite vacation ever. The best student in the class, instead of writing about his favorite vacation ever, writes a long story about trying to write a story about a book about an exciting vacation. This was the problem with Adaptation. It's cute, it's sometimes funny, it's sometimes fun, but it spends so much time winking and nodding at the viewer that it just gets to be annoying. The movie insists that we're in on the joke so many times that the joke gets tired really, really fast. It's too bad, too, because I enjoyed Cooper, Streep and the always stellar Brian Cox (hope he wins an Oscar one day). But, as a movie, this failed in a big, big way.
