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Adaptation
Columbia Pictures


7.3

based on 40 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 79 votes
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BOOKS:

Rebels On The Backlot by Sharon Waxman

MPAA 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)

GENRE(S):	Drama
WRITTEN BY:	Charlie Kaufman Donald Kaufman Susan Orlean (book The Orchid Thief)
DIRECTED BY:	Spike Jonze
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: May 20, 2003 Video: May 20, 2003 Theatrical: December 6, 2002
RUNNING TIME:	114 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

Received 6 Golden Globe nominations, including Best Picture (Musical or Comedy).

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...

100

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.

100

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

Surely the most creative trick of the year and grimly funny throughout.

100

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Screenwriting this smart, inventive, passionate and rip-roaringly funny is a rare species. It's magic.

100

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.

100

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.

100

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

What a bewilderingly brilliant and entertaining movie this is.

100

Washington Post Desson Thomson

May not be the first movie to examine the creative process. But it's the most playfully brilliant.

100

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.

100

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.

100

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.

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.

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.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

A highly enjoyable failure, a quandary that can't resolve itself.

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.

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.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Adaptation's success in engaging the audience in the travails of creating a screenplay is extraordinary.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Wastes amusing beginnings.

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.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

This is like a Ferris wheel--the ride's enjoyable but you've gone nowhere once it's over.

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 --

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.

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.

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.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

The most overrated movie of the year (of all time?) by people who should know better.

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.

The average user rating for this movie is 7.3 (out of 10) based on 79 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

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.

Brandon S gave it a10:
Really makes you think--one of my favorite movies. Exceptional acting and story to go with it.

James M gave it a10:
[***SPOILERS***] Personally I am appalled that this movie did not become an instant classic. It is no understatement to say that the screenplay is up there with Pulp Fiction as one of the best ever written, the directing is superb, Nicholas Cage deserved two separate oscars for his portrayals of both Donald and Charlie and best of all the film is so intelligent. I loved how Charlie was mocking Robert McKee by including deus ex machina in the films conclusion just because he was told not to. I adore the scene where Charlie asks Donald if he can hekp him out with the script because it is at this point exactly where the film it is no longer a story about a writer's frustration and dissapointment, but rather a story of intrigue, drugs and car chases. In the films final scenes ***SPOILER*** we are finally given the reasoning for this: the entire point of the third act was to kill off the Donald personality once and for all. ***END SPOLIER*** We must realise, of course, that Donald and Charlie are the same person, with Charlie being the intelligent one who wants to write original screenplays, while Donald wants to write that Jerry Bruckhiemer blockbuster. But I cannot explain how perfectly this film adresses every topic it wants to address, and how it magnificently explains the struggles of a writer. Easily Kaufman's best screenplay and Jonze's best film. Amazing in every sense of the word.

Chris F gave it a10:
Oh my goodness do I feel sorry for those sad few who do not "get" this movie. You truly have to be either arrogant, pretentious or inhuman to not be enchanted with this hilarious tale of the bizzare reality in which humans and nature entertwine.

tony b. gave it an8:
I personally enjoyed this movie very much i think the acting was exceptional the dialouge was good and i enjoyed the story very much.

Adaptation Columbia Pictures

Adaptation
Columbia Pictures