4. The Orchid Thief (Adaptation)
Rather like the swamp in the film's denouement, there's a lot of wading through metafilm before you can pin down what's going on here. Real-life screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) struggles to adapt real-life author Susan Orlean's (Meryl Streep) book The Orchid Thief for the big screen. Jealous of his fictitious twin brother Donald's (also Cage) success in the same field, Charlie finds that he has unwittingly written himself- with all his angst, infatuation and bumbling neuroses- into the screenplay. This osmosis reveals as much about the real Kaufman, of course, as the actor portraying him- yet it's not quite the exercise in narcissism, with director Spike Jonze finding just the right balance between smart and smarm. There's a clever irony in how Charlie refuses to allow sex, guns and life lessons into the Orchid script; while his own life suddenly succumbs to all three. Here, the seeds were sown for Synecdoche, New York.