The reteaming of the writer and the director of Being John Malkovich, Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, has produced no less madness but much more method. Or anyhow more meaning. Kaufman, playing fast and loose with the truth, evidently set out in reality (though it doesn't seem his sort of project) to do a screen adaptation of Susan Orlean's nonfiction best-seller, The Orchid Thief ("It's that sprawling New Yorker shit"), and ended up by writing himself and his creative torments into the script ("That's what I need to do: tie all of history together"). More precisely, what he wrote into the script was a fatter, balder, lonelier version of himself (Nicolas Cage, in a characterization of unsparing physical detail), together with an identical twin brother who is also a screenwriter, albeit a happy-go-lucky hack: not so much a separate entity as an alternative self or a divisive inner voice. In short, Kaufman found a way to make a movie out of a mess, or vice versa. The surviving movie is still very much a mess: two movies in one, with attendant disruptions of momentum and shifts in tone. Susan Orlean remains in place as a central figure (played by Meryl Streep, whose director on The River Wild, Curtis Hanson, plays her husband), in tormented pursuit of her own story, that of a toothless redneck orchid cultivator (Chris Cooper, in his best role so far, and fully up to it). The movie has much to say, and much of it quite funny, about such large subjects as the solitary struggles of the writer in front of the blank page (how soon can he take a break for a muffin, and what kind of muffin?), the tug-of-war between artistic integrity and commercial compromise, the hidden depths of people beneath their opaque surfaces. All of this, including the funniness, is not achieved without a mighty sense of strain. And no amount of winking self-awareness, postmodern irony, and impish impudence (Susan Orlean turns into a drug-trafficking homicidal adulteress) can lessen the disappointment of the climactic swerve into thriller-dillerdom. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd