Do you ever have moments in your life when an object or idea, or in this case a movie couldn’t have hit you at a more perfect time? I’m not necessarily a spiritual person, but it’s moments like these that make me wonder what higher forces might be at work.
It’s like when you get a fortune that’s excruciatingly generic, but for some reason you feel you can relate to it better than anyone else at that moment because it’s your fortune; it was written for you.
That’s how I felt when I saw “Adaptation” last week. I love that rare connection that happens when some part of you recognizes a counterpoint in something or someone else. Whether it’s a phrase or a gesture or a theme that makes you think “Huh … I could live my life by that.”
I don’t want to ruin it because I highly recommend everyone watch this movie, so if you are considering it, stop reading, rent it, and then come back, or if you’re the type of person who likes to know everything about a movie before seeing it, then keep reading.
“Adaptation” is about a screenwriter writing a movie about a journalist’s book that began as an article about an extravagant orchid thief.
American journalist and author, Susan Orlean wrote the non-fiction book The Orchid Thief in 2000. The inspiration came from writing an article on John Laroche in The New Yorker magazine. Laroche is a plant dealer in south Florida who poaches rare orchids. His passion is the ghost orchid, Dendrophylax lindenii. It’s endangered and nearly impossible to cultivate.
As a journalist, Orlean spends her life writing about other people, and not just other people, but their passions too. She decides her one passion in life is to be that passionate about anything. She wants to be as passionate about something as this man is about orchids.
I often think about this. As a journalist I am a spectator: I watch, I listen, I observe and I report back. I am not part of a specific passion, something tangible, unless an asphyxiation with a keyboard counts. Contractors love wood, horticulturalists love plants, engineers love bridges, and journalists love … writing, but they are rarely writing what they want to write. They’re filtering real-world things: disasters, discoveries, people into a clear, concise and hopefully interesting form. They’re not the firemen pulling bodies out of debris. They’re not the scientists trying to cure cancer, they’re just observers transporting information. This movie made me think … how often does this create a void for some reporters?