Watched on Amazon Video

The creative crisis has always been an elementary part of the artistic process. Everyone knows the feeling of sitting in front of a blank page and either not having a single thought or having far too many in their head. Time slips away, the pressure mounts, gradually more and more abstruse ideas come into play that are nevertheless completely useless. Yes, there is a charm, a fascination in this failure, which you can recognise at least if you are not currently affected by it yourself. But how does one deal with it? One of the simplest, but nevertheless most ingenious ideas is to make this creative crisis the subject of the film. This already helped Federico Fellini to create his greatest masterpiece "8 ½" and can be observed again and again over the decades in the most diverse art forms. Apart from the Coen brothers' Kafkaesque "Barton Fink", no one in the recent past has succeeded as well as Spike Jonze, who has created a magnificent film with "Adaptation".

But to attribute this merit to Spike Jonze alone would be simply wrong. Adaptation bears the signature of Charlie Kaufman even more, who puts himself on stage in the form of a double Nicholas Cage. In fact, the gifted screenwriter deals with his failed attempt to adapt Susan Orléans' book "The Orchied Thief" in this work by creating himself as the protagonist who fails to adapt the book and in the process writes the film within the film. Alongside the brilliantly performing Cage, the cast also includes Meryl Streep, Tilda Swinton and the Oscar-winning Chris Cooper. Carried by this consistently skilful acting troupe, the film visibly winds around itself without ever biting its own tail.

In the process, "Adaptation" is not only an examination of the artistic creative process, but also counteracts typical Hollywood mechanisms in an amusing way. Even in the swampy terrain of a crime story, the film persists through its madcap veneer, merrily manoeuvring from convention to convention to create something entirely its own. As erratic as the story is the emotional spectrum that Kaufman and Jonze depict. The change from juicy melancholy to effervescent joy looks like an uncomplicated finger exercise and so they play the keyboard from quiet to loud in fluid movements. Yes, "Adaptation" proves once again that Charlie Kaufman is one of the most creative and talented writers American cinema has to offer.