Charlie Kaufman is the go-to guy in Hollywood for surreal, postmodern metatextual screenwriting, his movies often self-reflexive exercises probing beneath the artifice of writing and filmmaking. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his screenplay for Adaptation, his second collaboration with director Spike Jonze, a film which blurs the line between "authentic" and "fictional" narratives to the point where they become almost unrecognisable. Nicholas Cage (back when he was still making decent movies - although the recent release Joe might have set him back on the right track) plays Charlie Kaufman, a writer hot of the heels of a great success struggling to adapt a novel with an unconventional structure, The Orchid Thief, to the screen. The arrival of his scrounging layabout twin brother (also Cage) doesn't help matters, and Charlie soon finds himself embroiled in the lives of the protagonists he's tasked with writing about. If you find yourself somewhat confused by what exactly is going on in Adaptation then you're not alone - the movie is often deliberately ambiguous, switching between and peeling back various layers of narrative only to reveal something of a puzzle box lying beneath it all. It's as if Kaufman has invited the audience inside the writing process itself, in all its unfinished, unexpurgated glory.
