The joy of trying to figure out a film

As the audience, we like to be involved, to work a little. It is called using your imagination, and in the theater and movies, it’s a lot of fun. In “Our Town,” the fact that two ladders and a bare stage represent the town of Grovers Corners, and ultimately the whole universe, is an exciting part of the experience of the play.

The audience is a muscle; use it or lose it.

You have to go back quite a long time to find a film that involves the audience in a series of puzzles as compelling as those in “Adaptation.” (Which of the events is fact, which fiction? Does Charlie Kaufman have a twin brother? Is the twin really dead? And so on.) I thought hard about when viewers last had so integral a role in a film and came up with “Lawrence of Arabia” -- partly because censorship then precluded open and clear references to Lawrence’s sexuality and thus we had to do some figuring that pulled us into the proceedings.

Then there was “2001,” where so much of the story was told in images instead of words that understanding it took time and consultation with those also in love with this great film.

And now, 35 years later, we’re talking about “Adaptation.”

Adaptation, the word, has an ever-growing number of meanings in this movie. The first, of course, refers to the adaptation of a book about orchids as a screenplay. There’s the Darwinian adaptation of flora like orchids, and fauna like us, to an ever-changing environment. But the meaning that’s most interesting to me is the one that refers to the way in which we in the movie business need to adapt to the tides of change in films. The Charlie Kaufman character, a professional screenwriter, is stunned to discover that his brother, who has never written anything more than a postcard, can come up with a screenplay that excites the studio far more than his own. Meryl Streep portrays a “real” character who’s caught up in a writer’s imagination (Charlie Kaufman’s first, then Donald Kaufman’s), and winds up trying out sex, drugs, car chases and shootings. The character gets drawn and redrawn by both Kaufman brothers until -- adaptation at work -- she’s in the middle of the drugs-chases-shootings business.

Movies have changed, the screenwriter(s) seem to say. You take the jobs that are offered, you do the best you can. This is expressed with engaging brilliance and humor.

We get to see jokes and meanings unfold continually as the story develops, and as we take it home and examine the pieces, turning them this way and that. My family, friends and I got into arguments about the movie, its meaning, its ending: “Is all that violence really necessary?” “But that’s the point, it’s the joke!”

We don’t need it to be simple. The joy is in figuring it out.

Movies are a very young art form, 107 years old to be precise. Since the Lumiere brothers invented them in 1895, they have developed with astonishing rapidity. Some of us have seen movies change from the time of “Casablanca,” when movies concerned themselves with other parts of the world, to the present, in which we are involved with ourselves, but dream of other planets and their denizens.

“Adaptation,” like “Being John Malkovich,” moves the evolution (or is it adaptation?) of movies along. This is a pleasure for those of us who are used to seeing progress and greatness in things that take hard work to understand and appreciate. Nobody ever enjoyed reading “Ulysses,” I don’t care what they say. And, although I risk my life here, there aren’t a lot of laughs in “Citizen Kane.”

“Adaptation,” I believe, is that rare thing: something brand new that is a hell of a lot of fun.

*

Director Mike Nichols’ films include “The Graduate” and “The Birdcage.”