John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep.
#28 — Susan Orlean, a New Yorker writer drawn to the eccentric orchid poacher she is profiling.
JOHN: “Why can’t there be a movie simply about flowers?” asks perspiring screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) to film executive Tilda Swinton from across a table at a posh Hollywood restaurant. “I don’t want to cram in sex or car chases or guns.” One could imagine that Meryl Streep, who has resolutely avoided nudity, drugs, and violence throughout her career, has contemplated this same question. As Susan Orlean, Streep’s outwardly demure and professional demeanor is irreversibly shaken by the oddly captivating John Laroche (Chris Cooper), a Florida orchid hunter, nursery owner, and part-time porn site operator. To watch Streep, at age 53, fire guns, appear nude (read: blatantly Photoshopped) on Laroche’s site, straddle him, and, most incredibly, snort an orchid-based narcotic, getting high and humming along to a phone dial tone, is to experience a dizzying yet satisfying whiplash.
These images shock not because Streep is so decisively stepping off her pedestal but because she performs these increasingly absurd scenarios with such fresh and cheeky conviction. And while Susan Orlean’s late-film breakdown posits a wholly untapped channel of Streep’s talent, there is an underlying sadness and heartache that is equally compelling from start to finish, revealing a midlife crisis in which one woman’s seemingly fulfilling life completely falls to pieces. In a career full of startling transformations, and within a film whose very subject are the acts of adapting and evolving, Adaptation. remains Streep’s most singular and surprising performance.
Susan Orlean is a New Yorker writer on assignment in southern Florida following up on a bonkers news item about a white man, John Laroche, and several Native Americans caught stealing rare flowers from the Fakahatchee State Preserves. With her hair pulled back, tinted sunglasses, and notepad dutifully in hand, she slinks into the courtroom at Laroche’s trial, first surveying this outrageous character at a distance. She meets him outside and asks if he would be interested in being the subject of a profile. This proves to be equally advantageous: he can use her magazine’s esteem to satisfy his imploded ego while she lands a human interest goldmine. Laroche rambles on about orchids, turtles, fossils, tropical fish, and Darwinism, among other topics, cursing indiscriminately and hitting every bump on the road while Susan marvels at his “delusions of grandeur” and absence of front teeth. She later visits Laroche’s nursery, where Vinson, one of John’s Native American workers, comments on her beautiful hair. “Oh, thank you… I washed it this morning, so… I’m using a new conditioner…" she says, taken aback. “I can see your sadness,” he replies, “It’s lovely.” Streep’s expression is alarmed by both the confrontational nature of this man’s comment and the possibility that this stranger has unearthed a quality heretofore concealed. As Vinston susses out the sorrow in Susan’s life, her reserved but seemingly satisfied journalist begins to wonder if her life will ever allow for a passion as consuming and exciting as Laroche’s floral obsession. Why don’t you continue with Ms. Orlean at her dinner party?
MATTHEW: When is the last time you can remember a female character arc in a major mainstream motion picture that was defined not by a journey of self-discovery but a sense of retreat or regression rather than progress? And when is the last time you can remember this arc enacted by one of the most universally acclaimed actresses of the 20th century, who is now well into the age range when just about all of her peers start popping up as Haughty Grand-Dams and Eccentric Aunts, as opposed to soul-searching, drug-addicted, and giddily libidinous journalists? This character description speaks to the genius of Charlie (and Donald) Kaufman’s nervy conception of Adaptation.’s Susan Orlean yet it’s also what makes the actual casting of Meryl Streep such a radical proposition. Streep, who called Kaufman’s script “the best [she] has ever read,” has certainly played women on the edge before, but we have seldom seen her inhabit a character increasingly inclined to detonate her entire way of life from the inside.
We hear Streep’s Susan Orlean before we fully see her, recounting, in voiceover, her introduction into the volatile world of John Laroche. Her voice is soothing but also somewhat depersonalized, like that of a veteran audiobook narrator on her sixth chapter of the day; when we finally encounter her head-on, she appears so peaceful in front of her laptop, a vision of equanimous beauty. But this is an illusion, one of the last instances in which we’ll witness Susan Orlean at peace. And this is because the Susan Orlean that Streep, Kaufman, and director Spike Jonze have envisioned in almost alchemic tandem is a human embodiment of the profoundly personal costs of maintaining one’s mask in all areas of life.
This is never better exemplified than in an early scene in which Susan and her husband (played by Streep’s The River Wild director Curtis Hanson) entertain a group of their nearest and most distinguished friends (including Vogue’s Lisa Love, the psychologist Wendy Mogel, and director David O. Russell) with stories of Laroche’s idiosyncratic personality traits and unbecoming physical features, told with eager dismissiveness. Susan is a game participant amid this circle of ridicule, but when she retires to the bathroom, something changes. As her husband continues the story in her absence and their guests continue to roar with laughter in the other room, Susan’s giggling dies out and the smile drains from Streep’s face. She looks at herself in the mirror and raises a nervous hand to her mouth, eyes staring back at each other with shame before quickly darting away, as though Susan is really seeing herself for the first time and recoiling from the image before her. The moment is brief but it unlocks the entire performance that follows, gradually revealing the inchoate sadness buried beneath the chipper, people-appeasing reflexes of a person who had, up until this moment, never questioned the meaning of her life?
But what exactly has spurred Susan’s spark of awareness? Could it be her participation in this petty conversation, which has lessened Laroche, a man only growing in her admiration and fascination, to a quirky crank? Or is it that this conversation so easily continues without her, the story she ventured out to find told by a man with only a secondhand connection to its events, thus casting aside her own involvement and diminishing her very ownership of the story. Can Susan’s profession, her passion, be reduced to the act of locating human interest stories for the cruel and fleeting amusement of limousine liberals? Rather than alight on any of these explanations, Streep embraces the thrilling irresolution of open-ended possibility, not seeking answers so much as dwelling in this moment of recognition. When we next see her, sitting at dinner and then lying in bed beside the husband who is somehow so far away from her, Susan quietly vibrates with the revelation that she has been playing a role for longer than she can remember, and that the life she leads is lonelier and more unfulfilled than she had ever thought possible. But what begins as a possible search for clarity only becomes a deeper, more desperate form of delusion. Why don’t you take us through the next stages of Susan’s descent, which carries her away from the upper stories of Manhattan and into the muddy, impenetrable swamps of Laroche’s heart?
JOHN: You’re right in noting that Susan Orlean’s almost willful disintegration is an extremely unusual character trait for an actress at Streep’s age, and for actresses of all ages in Hollywood. It’s a role, when considered outside the film’s style, that recalls the ecstatic theatrical plunges of Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes. But even more so, Streep’s Susan Orlean is also a radically dissimilar biopic performance from perhaps our preeminent biopic actress. Susan is a decidedly ordinary woman, sans accent or period costume, and her very presence on screen is a testament to the filmmakers’ gonzo imagination rather than some factual representation of the very real writer named Susan Orlean. Freed from “getting it right” and playing a comparatively lesser-known figure, Streep’s hybrid performance combines the uninhibited naturalism of the “real” Orlean and the inspired creative leaps the script requires of this fictionalized counterpart.
Streep’s triumph in the film’s first, more “realistic” half is the palpable sadness Susan reveals through her curiosity with Laroche. While her husband is away on business, Streep rings Laroche in bed to “get some more information” for her article, but she quickly finds herself becoming more candid with this near-stranger, admitting that if her husband almost killed her in a car crash, she would leave her marriage, as Laroche and his wife did: “It’s like a free pass. No one can judge you if you almost died.” Susan requests that John guide her on a tour of the Fakahatchee, enthralled by his obsession and secretly hoping that some of his passion will rub off on her. What begins as a promising and exciting adventure to see the ghost orchid quickly becomes an unfulfilling trek through a humid swamp where Laroche gets them both lost. As Laroche tries to fashion a sundial in the shaded marsh out of twig and mud, Streep must negotiate her irritation with the dashed hopes of coming into contact with Laroche’s elusive flower and the uneasy realization that Laroche might have duped her into a crisis; is this guy profound, or is he just nuts? Waist-deep in the Fakahatchee, Streep looks up into the trees, hoping for some answer, for some clarification, in this increasingly bizarre trip. As Orlean, Streep reads from her book, “Life seemed to be filled with things that were just like the ghost orchid — wonderful to imagine and easy to fall in love with but a little fantastic and fleeting and out of reach,” a snippet of hard-earned wisdom made all the more moving after watching Orlean discover it first-hand.
Susan Orlean is experiencing the kind of existential crisis that would inevitably lead someone to snort an exotic plant. Another duplicity: Laroche wanted to harvest the ghost orchid to manufacture a secret Seminole drug, a pursuit possibly outside the realm of his proclaimed passion for botany. Streep, game as ever, approaches this development with both skepticism and fascination. Laroche delivers an envelope of the green powder to her hotel room. What follows is an absolute master class in onscreen doping: Streep is both extremely precise and refreshingly loopy as she snorts the powdered-orchid-stem. While brushing her teeth in her bathroom, Streep, waiting for the effect while watching herself brush, suddenly stops, reverses the circular motion, and looks downright confused that such a product actually worked. Streep has rarely been as uninhibited as she is during Susan’s dazed state, trying to hum along to the exact tune of a dial tone and cradling her foot in her arms. “I’m very happy right now, Johnny. I’m very happy,” she tells Cooper while laying across her bed, looking absolutely radiant and cherubic while also relating a convincing high. There’s a coy, playful flirtiness to the way Streep speaks to Cooper, almost like a teenage girl summoning the courage to make the first move on her crush. Her high is infectious; can you think of another instance of Streep being so blissfully zonked-out, this playful, or this loose on screen?
MATTHEW: I cannot, and that’s a testament to the rarity of Streep’s task in Adaptation., as well as to the incomparable brilliance of the master herself. She gives Kaufman and Jonze’s slyness a total sincerity of feeling, matching their ingenuity with her own creativity, beat for beat. True, Streep has seldom been asked to immerse herself in the internalized psychedelia that Susan undergoes in the film’s third act. But the buoyant, loose-limbed jubilancy that Streep emits while cackling and writhing around a hotel bed in the midst of Susan’s intoxication feels like a revelation, not only because you’d have to go back more than a decade to Postcards from the Edge to find Streep at the center of a realistic comedy, but because the actress herself has hardly ever let herself lose control in the eyes of her filmgoing public.
In the performance that precedes this scene, Streep blurs the divide between Susan’s crafted persona and the moments in which she is possibly just being herself, whoever that may be. She projects the stillness of a subject in a painting, occupying a state of watchful curiosity while continually capturing varied states of emotion and then embodying their essences with a purposeful composure that loses its cool control as Susan grows ever more despairing. I love that you brought up that mid-movie confessional, in which Susan tells Laroche that she would use a near-death experience as an excuse to exit her marriage, not only because it’s a prime example of Streep making the character’s delirious epiphanies matter with her casual conviction, but because it’s one of the first instances in which we can clearly glimpse the Susan Orlean that Adaptation. will end on: the impetuous and irresponsible free spirit who is far less free than she will soon realize. Susan does more than ditch her reserve, but rather free falls recklessly into utter abandon, opting for the hallucinatory, time-stopping recesses that come with Laroche’s company. Jonze and former cinematographer-of-choice Lance Acord shoot these scenes of Susan’s short-lived seclusion with a sun-kissed luster that Streep basks and beams in, exuding girlish glee as she lies on her belly in the grass, mindlessly admiring the shiny ants on a leaf.
It’s only when Charlie and Donald intrude upon Susan’s secret side life with John that the dark disgrace of her actions comes into focus. Confused by the presence of this hapless screenwriter whose knowledge of her indiscretions might lead to her downfall, Susan untangles like a ball of yarn, her words, her worries, trickling out like thoughts running from the brain and her eyes bulging, resembling the stare of a child caught red-handed in some act of wrongdoing. At times, Jonze tries to emulate the cornucopia of sheer invention that is Kaufman’s screenplay with a frenetic application of style that he ditches only when Streep occupies his frames. As a paranoid and inebriated Susan decides what to do with Charlie, Jonze settles his camera completely on Streep, whose face floods the screen, working through the process of decision-making with a reserve that is tremendously transfixing and eradicates the need for any filmmaking tricks. Twenty years after Sophie’s Choice and twenty-five years after her big screen debut, Streep knows she need only move her nervous brows, her restless eyes, or her quivering mouth in just the slightest manner to court our gaze and keep us wondering insatiably.
When Susan ultimately decides on murdering Charlie, Adaptation. briefly casts Streep as a cold-blooded, would-be killer, a role that fascinates because it’s one we’d never expect to see the actress placed in. But what’s most indelible about our last glimpses at Susan Orlean is the bottomless well of misery that Streep unearths in her concluding scene, sharing a look of defeat with Laroche from across the swamp in which he will, in just a matter of seconds, lose his life, and then, finally, howling with rage at Charlie as she cradles Laroche’s lifeless body in her arms, whimpering, “I want to be a baby again, I want to be new,” with a pitiable mournfulness for a life that can never be restored. Susan has at long last reached a stage in her regression that cannot be cut across, and I will never forget the sobs of dawning loss that slacken the entire body of one of our mightiest acting legends, who has never looked so broken or so lost.
John and I both frequently bemoan Streep’s seeming disinterest in pursuing collaborators as adventurous and risk-inclined as Jonze and Kaufman. I still feel that way, but, in truth, Streep’s performance in Adaptation. scales the type of sublime heights that we witness only once or twice, if at all, in the careers of most performers. It remains an inspired and still staggering pairing of character and interpreter, and the type of challenge seldom afforded to actresses in the latter stages of their stardom. Susan Orlean could have easily been a neurotic, erudite New York sophisticate with a clear-cut sense of discontentment, but Streep aims for the ineffable and achieves it in scene after scene. This is a feat deeply fitting for a performance characterized by a yearning for something indescribable and, finally, the unbearable agony that such impossible desires can allow to devour us whole. Streep’s wide eyes and slack jaw reflect our own reaction, which is the all-consuming wonder of watching a creation we could never have possibly envisioned yet is now suddenly present, walking, talking, and unraveling before us.
