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Cast: Nioclas cage (Charlie Kaufman/ Donald Kaufman), Meryl Streep (Susan Orlean), Chris Cooper (John Laroche)
Written by: Charlie Kaufman and The Great Donald (With invaluable inputs from Mr. McKee’s writing seminars)
Directed by: Spike Jonze
Release date: December 2002

Charlie Kaufman has a book to adapt. It’s a book about orchids. And a funny guy who steals orchids. Charlie knows that he just wants to let the movie exist and not make it artificially plot-driven. But he doesn’t know how to do it. He’s past his deadline. He’s spending agonizing, sleepless nights. He sits on the typewriter promising himself a coffee and a muffin if he is able to make a start on his screenplay. He talks to the jacket photograph of the author Susan Orleans. Finally to his own dismay, he ends up writing himself into the script. And his eternally blissful, happy-go-lucky twin brother, Donald. And the statuesque studio executive. And his super agent Marty. And of course Susan, the New York intellectual and the scruffily handsome John Laroche, the orchid thief.

Welcome to Kaufman’s fantastic imaginarium. You may be under the mistaken impression that you are watching a movie. What you see is the magnificent, darkly mesmerizing creature known in common parlance as the creative process, intoxicated with the infinite possibilities inherent in the chance and the design which make up so-called reality. It spreads its hesitant wings, takes flight and transforms into a mobius strip with multiple indistinguishable surfaces, blurring the lines between fact and fiction till they turn irrelevant.

Charlie is a fat, balding, neurotic introvert who keeps obsessing about his shortcomings when it comes to his writing, his social skills and pretty much anything and everything else. His twin Donald is also fat, balding, talentless and obnoxiously charming. He decides to follow in the footsteps of his illustrious brother and become a screenwriter. He joins a three day story-telling seminar by Mr. McKee, puts up his ten commandments over his desk and begins work on an utterly original script about a cop and a serial-killer who are one and the same person. Nicolas Cage nails the characters of the the tortured writer and his cheerful alter-ego with careful precision.

Laroche catalogues the stages of his life through his collecting obsessions during different phases since the age of ten. He has hunted for turtles, tropical fish, ice-age fossils and now he collects orchids. But he does not let himself be defined by these quirks. He adopts and abandons them with equal ease, retaining the reckless self of John Laroche, like a snake shedding its skin. Susan Orleans, the middle aged New Yorker journalist clutches to him in the hope of realizing her one true desire of understanding what it feels to care passionately about something. While Chris Cooper steals the show with his unfettered yet subtly layered performance, Meryl Streep is fascinating as usual in her portrayal of a woman who sees something she desperately wants, brushes her fingertips against it but is too afraid to grab it with both hands.

This movie is an audacious journey down the rabbit-hole. Arriving at one crossroad after another, it doesn’t wait and choose which direction to take. It simultaneously scampers off along all. And the brilliance of the conceit is such that you feel that you feel that there was no other way to have done it…other than to imagine the unimaginable and to risk losing it all…