Watched Adaptation over the holidays with the brother and sister-in-law in New Jersey. I enjoyed Nicholas Cage's acting tour de force, playing an angst-ridden, intellectual, original screen-writer, and his cheerful, confident, cliche-loving twin brother, with similar mannerisms and different personalities.
I was entertained by the dogged resistance to making a movie without hollywood plot cliches -- sex, drugs, chase scenes, personal revelation -- and eventual surrender to a short, devastating parody of hollywood style.
The film even plays games with emotional trajectory; there's one red herring, the striving of the New Yorker writer and screen-writer to "follow their bliss"; and the emotional moral the movie chooses; to "be confident, despite critics." The film could have easily swapped themes and worked as well; it's a critique of the tacked on "moral of the story" chosen from at random from the cliches of therapeutic culture.
It's either a measure of a small bit of heart in the movie, despite overall cynicism; or personal vulnerability, but I resonated with the intellectual snobbery toward his sincere and middlebrow brother that the main character has to unlearn.
Ultimately, though, as Judith comments, the film-school cleverness isn't as smart as it thinks it is. A film-school student watches oodles of movies, realizes that there are no new stories left, and that the industry uses golden chains to tie film-makers to sentimental and dramatic cliches.
Shakespeare had that problem -- the groundlings all wanted fight scenes; comedies have a happy ending; tragedies end with blood on the stage. Homer presumably had that problem -- there were hundreds of years of story-telling; he had to get the audience to listen to him, and somehow do something new.
Posted by alevin at January 10, 2004 02:16 PM | TrackBack