The Great Movies III

Meanwhile, Minosa grows weaker and depends on Tatum for his contact with the surface. The pounding drill, growing closer, tortures him. Rival newsmen complain about Tatum's role: he controls access to the rescue, the story, and the wife. With every day that passes, the story grows bigger. And Tatum manufactures news on a slow day. He plunges into the cave with a priest and a doctor, and finds out from Leo about his anniversary present for the wife who despises him. It's a fur scarf. Tatum hands it to her and tells her to wear it. She hates it. He almost chokes her with it. She wears it.

Kirk Douglas (born in 1916) was and still is a ferocious competitor. Little wonder one of his first screen roles was as a boxer in Champion (1949). When I interviewed him for Esquire in 1969, the role of a champion was his central theme: "It doesn't matter if you're a nice guy or you're a bastard. What matters is, you won't bend!" His focus and energy as Chuck Tatum is almost scary. There is nothing dated about Douglas's performance. It's as right-now as a sharpened knife.

Tatum drives relentlessly toward his goal of money and fame, and if there's a moment when we think he might take pity on Minosa, that's just Wilder, yanking our chains. The way Tatum's thinking evolves about the trapped man is a study in subtlety of direction, writing, and acting. In a lesser movie, Tatum would share our sympathy for the pathetic man. Here, he's on a parabola in that direction but wants it to intersect with the moment of his own greatest fame.

Wilder, born in Austria, a refugee from Hitler, certainly became one of America's greatest directors. But he never bought into the American dream. What he saw in Europe warned him off dreams. Although Ace in the Hole has always been considered one of his greatest films, its rejection by the marketplace isn't surprising: moviegoers like crime, like suspense, like violence, but they like happy endings, and Wilder is telling them to wake up and smell the coffee.

When the film was released, the press complained about its portrait of news practices and standards, even though the story was inspired by a real media circus when a man named Floyd Collins was trapped in a Kentucky cave. Today, it is hard to imagine some segments of the press not recognizing their hunger for sensation. The same might be said of the public; after the movie was finished, the studio sold admissions to its mountain sets outside Gallup, New Mexico.

harlie Kaufman's screenplay for Adaptation (2002) has it three ways. It is wickedly playful in its construction, it gets the story told, and it doubles back and kids itself. There is also the sense that to some degree it's true: that it records the torments of a screenwriter who doesn't know how the hell to write a movie about orchids. And it has the audacity to introduce characters we know are based on real people and has them do shocking things.

Even the DVD maintains the illusion of life colliding with art. The case contains a Columbia interoffice memo, seemingly included by accident, not even referring to this movie. And it is startling to see an ant crawling across the main menu until you get to the dialogue line, "I wish I were an ant."

The movie is the second collaboration between Kaufman and director Spike Jonze, after the equally brilliant Being John Malkovich (1999). Jonze spends most of his time making music videos and documentaries, but when he makes a movie, it's a spellbinder, and he has the serene confidence to wade into this Kaufman screenplay and know that he can pull it off.

The movie is inspired by The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean, a best seller expanded from an article in the New Yorker. It involves mankind's fascination for these extraordinary flowers, the blood that has been spilled in collecting them, their boundless illustration of Darwin's ideas about natural selection, and a contemporary orchid hunter in Florida who is a strange, compelling man. Considered simply like that, the book might have inspired a National Geographic special.

It could also have been a straight fiction film about the life and times of John Laroche, a Miami eccentric who hit upon the idea of collecting endangered species of orchids from swampland that was Seminole territory. By using real Seminoles to obtain his specimens, he exploited their legal right to use their own ancestral lands. Laroche himself is a student of orchids, and he narrates a poetic passage about the limitless shapes that orchids can take in attracting insects-imitating their shapes and coloring, while all the while neither the flower nor the insect realizes what is happening.There is even one orchid so strangely shaped that Darwin hypothesized a moth with a twelve-inch proboscis that could dip down into its long, hollow tube. Such a moth was actually found.