Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Adaptation.
2002 · Spike Jonze · Adaptation. on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how close the camera stays to Cage when Charlie sweats. (camera)
Lance Acord shoots Los Angeles handheld, in available light, tight on the body: the damp forehead, the hunched shoulders, the cluttered desk. Florida opens out, lyrical and green. Two worlds, two camera manners.
Payoff: The camera is stuck with Charlie's body while the orchid world stays out of reach, which is his whole problem.
Watch Cage's shoulders change when Charlie becomes Donald. (performance)
No wigs, no prosthetics. Charlie hunches, mumbles, apologizes. Donald sits upright, open-faced, pitched a little higher and louder. Cage builds two men out of posture and voice alone.
Payoff: Two ways of being alive in one body. The film's argument about the divided self is carried entirely by Cage. In the reading: the crystal-image (hyalosign). The reading calls the twins a crystal-image: the actual writer and the writer he might be, swapping places in one frame.
Listen for when the voiceover and the picture disagree. (sound)
Charlie narrates almost continuously. Sometimes the image obeys him. Often it contradicts him, or takes him literally, or keeps rolling while he talks himself out of what you just saw.
Payoff: You are inside a mind arguing with its own eyes, which is why the comedy keeps turning into ache.
Count how many time streams the film is running. (structure)
Eric Zumbrunnen cuts between Charlie writing, the story he is writing, Orlean's earlier reporting in Florida, and flashes reaching back to childhood and further. Keep track of which one you are in.
Payoff: The braid keeps the man at the desk and the world he cannot write inside the same sentence. In the reading: the noosign / cinema-of-the-brain. The reading calls this a noosign: the screen working like a brain, thinking on the cut instead of just showing events.
Watch Cooper's hands and mouth when Laroche talks about orchids. (performance)
Cooper plays Laroche as a man wholly filled by whatever currently grips him. Gap-toothed, fast-talking, evangelical. Streep's Orlean starts opposite him, composed and dry, and keeps leaning closer as she listens.
Payoff: He has the thing Charlie and Orlean both want and cannot manufacture. Watching him is watching passion from outside it.
Once you have seen it
Track when the cutting picks up speed in the last half hour. (cutting)
After McKee's seminar the rhythm changes. Zumbrunnen starts cross-cutting for peril, the way a thriller does. The form gets more competent by Hollywood's measure exactly as Charlie stops holding the line.
Payoff: The editing performs the capitulation. You can hear the film change its mind in the rhythm of the cuts.
Notice how little of Orlean's book is left by the end. (structure)
The film sets up the orchids, the reporting, the plotless meditation, then replaces all of it with a stakeout and a swamp. The source is composed carefully and then swallowed.
Payoff: What survives is the record of failing to film the book, which turns out to be the film. In the reading: crystalline description. The reading calls this crystalline description: an image that builds its object carefully and then quietly puts itself in its place.
Look at how the brothers are placed in shared shots. (staging)
Split-screen compositing, motion control, doubles and careful eyelines put the twins in one frame. Jonze keeps them physically close, sharing a house, a car, a doorway. Proximity is the emotional argument.
Payoff: The technical trick is doing character work. Two halves of one man cannot get out of each other's frame.
Listen to Burwell's score under the jokes. (sound)
Burwell writes melancholy, not comedy. The music takes Charlie's paralysis and Laroche's obsessions seriously and refuses to wink. In the last stretch the conventional thriller furniture arrives and the contrast is deliberate.
Payoff: The score is what keeps the recursion from going cold. Someone in this film is feeling all of it.
Carry this in: Charlie narrates his own failure while the picture goes on without him. Watch where the image disagrees with the voice.