Trailer Blogger

Click to watch the Adaptation trailer at Zuguide.com

Usually, I find reading a book or watching a movie in which writing by one or more of the characters is central to the plot to be some of the most narrow, least inspired forms of entertainment imaginable. It’s as though the author or screenwriter has spent so much time writing that they have forgotten what normal people do. But, in Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman succeeds in blowing that convention to little bits even though he names his main character after himself and obsesses over the difficulties of writing a screenplay from start to finish.

The story features three writers: Nicolas Cage as Charlie, a sweaty, nervous, balding writer tasked with adapting a novel into a screenplay, Nicolas Cage again as Donald, Charlie’s moronic twin brother who takes screenwriting classes and personifies every Hollywood cliché in the process, and Meryl Streep, as Susan Orlean, the novelist whose work Charlie is meant to turn into a movie script. Even though Adaptation is overflowing with writers, it overcomes the pitfalls other works about writing succumb to by wholeheartedly embracing the ridiculousness of its subject matter and having the three writers (and their writing styles) converge and collapse on one another in a dark bayou.

The trailer begins with Cage (as Charlie) reciting a self-conscious inner monologue as he meets with Tilda Swinton for a business lunch. It goes on to chronicle all the other difficulties Cage faces in his horribly stressful life: writer’s block, rejection by waitresses of the opposite sex and an annoyingly enthusiastic twin brother. After giving you an idea of Cage’s state of mind, the trailer turns its attention to Streep (currently starring in Mamma Mia) and her novel about orchids and an orchid thief named John Laroche, played by Chris Cooper. For a film with a potentially confusing premise, the Adaptation trailer actually does a great job in laying out the plot, and even ends by showing how Cage (as both Charlie and Donald) eventually tracks down Streep and Cooper to better understand their characters, leading to the convergence of their worlds and stories. My favorite section of the trailer comes when Donald is telling Charlie about his new action movie screenplay and explains that a chase scene he’s written symbolizes the battle between technology and horses. Adaptation opened January 10, 2003. Check out the Adaptation trailer at Zuguide.com.