Adaptation - Script Study

Film: Adaptation

Screenplay by: Charlie Kaufman

A lucid meditation on storytelling (and writer’s block), the twisty comedic film does for screenwriting what Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963) did for directing: It makes a brilliant show of eating itself in a dizzy multi-layered triumph of meta layered revelations. Deploying postmodern musings and metatextuality, it carries the thrillingly unpredictable charge of a film writing itself before your eyes.

In the film Adaptation, Nicolas Cage plays screenwriter Charlie Kaufman who desperately tries to avoid using plot devices belonging to the “classical narrative structure,” giving the movie an ironic pattern as those same devices common to the classical Hollywood narrative are contained in Adaptation. While several instances of this ironic pattern can be found in the film, one of the most obvious is the use of a “deus ex machina” near the end of the film. Robert Mckee, the famous instructor for screenwriters (played by Brian Cox) gives Charlie advice on how to finish his screenplay, expressly forbidding a “deus ex machina” in the ending to Charlie’s narrative.

However, the film utilizes a “deus ex machina” in the form of an alligator, who attacks and kills the antagonist just seconds before he would have killed the protagonist. As soon as Laroche is dead, the alligator swims away, gone just as quickly as it came.