“I’m fat, I’m bald, I’m disgusting, I’m old,” seems the opening line of a Harvey Weinstein biopic as he repents for his sins in an untimely act of self-loathing and reflection while waiting at the gates of the hell (even the devil won’t let him in). Or was it a line by Ernest Stavro Blofeld in thunderball, confide in his cat-in-hand therapist before James Bond rudely interrupted him? No, it was actually Charlie Kaufman in his 2002 screenplay for Amendmenthis movie about himself and his imaginary brother adapting the book The orchid thief after the success of Kaufman’s previous film being John Malkovich.
Later this year, the showpiece of Kaufman and Spike Jonze will turn 20. Two decades after its release, the film critics raved about has aged like a bottle of 2002 Pinot Noir — as tasty, if not better, in 2022 than it was in 2002, though the film will have to wait another year before it’s legal. may raise a glass. The partnership between Jonze and Kaufman was a tried and true formula, a critical success story that began four years earlier with being John Malkovichand Amendment was another film heading for a critical love-in.
Amendment stars Nicolas Cage, a man as famous for his stellar career in the performing arts as he is for having his face adorned on various pieces of furniture that make for more comfortable seating. The comedy-drama centers on the story of Charlie Kaufman, a writer who suffers from writer’s block and struggles over author Susan Orlean’s novel (brilliantly played by Meryl Streep) about an orchid collector and thief, John Laroche (Chris Cooper), turn it into a viable, digestible scenario.
Charlie lives with his twin brother Donald (also played by Nicolas Cage), whose simple yet cheerful determined temperament makes him excel at screenwriting and his love life, much to Charlie’s disdain. With time running out to complete the project, Charlie enlists the help of his twin sister, and together they resort to extreme measures to complete their collaborative script.
Charlie, Donald and Cage’s Portrait of Twins
The character ‘Charlie Kaufman’ is a profusely sweaty, fat, balding, self-hating screenwriter, whose scathing self-criticism is actually a pretty accurate assessment of his current condition, and he also acts as the film’s primary protagonist and antagonist. He finds solutions to his problems and then problems to his solutions, constantly caught in this endless merry-go-round of internal conflict. Cage is superb at playing a half-celebrated but now hapless screenwriter who, in the midst of an existential crisis, must try to convey the uncommunicable, bringing one’s written work into cinematic understanding.
Except he can’t, as he’s plagued by writer’s block and the novel’s stark lack of compatibility for a film adaptation. It takes a lot of mastery to really navigate a role with finesse, but to play two characters in the same movie so brilliantly is an astonishing feat in acting. Cage overcomes arguably the toughest obstacle for an actor who dares to play twins, appearing physically as the same person, while conveying enough disparate mannerisms, personality, and voice for the audience to discern who’s who.
Charlie and Donald really do come across as two separate entities. Charlie is a downtrodden self-loathing intellectual, a man with proven talent in his craft, but whose painful social awkwardness stands in the way of putting together a script. On the other hand, Donald is a cheerful confident optimist; Fully aware of his twin brother’s intellectual superiority, he charmingly responds to Charlie’s better judgment and constantly seeks his twin brother’s approval. The line between Charlie van Cage and Donald van Cage is never blurred or confused.
A fusion of genre conventions and storylines
Amendment is part biopic, part fiction, part documentary, part drama, part comedy, and all meta: it combines multiple aspects of various genre conventions to create what arguably should be a disjointed mess, but really is a phenomenally well-done bit of filmmaking. It’s a film that successfully blends three storylines into seemingly alternate realities, eventually merging at their final destination to shape this truly mind-boggling finale.
Essentially, it’s a movie written by Charlie Kaufman about Charlie Kaufman writing about Charlie Kaufman. The actual, real, non-fictional Kaufman was tasked with producing Susan Orlean’s actual, real, non-fictional novel the orchid thief, which is about the real, real, non-fictional life of orchid collector John Laroche. It documents Kaufman’s struggles trying to turn the book into a movie, so out of daring creativity (and semi-complacency), he decides to write about his own struggles writing the film, which has his writer’s block, Susan and John’s Relationship, his fictional brother Donald, as well as a poignant meditation on change, authenticity, solipsism and art.
Amendment is this strange and wonderful entanglement of storylines, one that weaves itself together to form an intricate knot before unraveling to reveal how the film was made. It’s like a manual explaining how the manual we’re reading was made. Confusing? Yes. But even after 20 years, Amendment is a brilliantly original screenplay and a film that never loses the thread of what it’s trying to achieve.