“You are what you love, not what loves you.”
synopsis
A deeply insecure screenwriter struggles to adapt a nonfiction book about orchid thieves into a movie—while wrestling with his confident twin brother, Hollywood formulas, and his own paralyzing self-doubt.
pairs well with ...
mini-review
This is a movie about the terror of creation, the fraudulence we all feel, and the lies we tell ourselves in order to get anything finished. It’s clever without being smug, neurotic without being exhausting, and meta without disappearing entirely up its own screenplay. Charlie Kaufman turns writer’s block into an existential crisis—and somehow makes it funny, poignant, and oddly suspenseful.
Much of the script sticks remarkably close to historical letters and documented debates.
Absurdist's Corner
A movie about failing to adapt a book ultimately adapts the book by inventing car chases, drugs, sex, and murder—everything it insists it refuses to do. Somewhere, irony called and asked for royalties.
fun facts
Nicolas Cage plays two roles—both versions of the same man—and they feel like genuinely different people.
The real author, Susan Orlean, appears as a fictionalized version of herself.
The movie gradually becomes the kind of Hollywood adaptation it claims to despise.
Robert McKee, the famed screenwriting guru, plays himself.