Either I or someone else or both mentioned a while back that Adaptation was original. WRONG ANSWER. Adaptation’s premise of making a screenplay out of the act of making a screenplay is mimiced entirely here… this is a movie out of the act of making a movie.
Aping Fellini’s 8 1/2 is almost like a rite of passage for a certain type of film-maker. Understandable, really - 8 1/2 is one of the rare instances of a creative talent painting himself into a corner and coming up with a brilliant way out. (Too bad Coppola could pull that off with Apocalypse Now.) It’s a monumental and exhilirating cinematic switcheroo, a post-modern watershed, which also happens to put the character of the director at the exact centre of universe. No wonder movie-makers like it so much.
Very few films have been subject to as many unofficial remakes (hommages, if you’re feeling generous, or rip-offs if you’re not). There’s Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, which lifts the shot-but-never-used original opening to 8 1/2. There’s Mazurzky’s Alex In Wonderland, about which the less said the better, which went so far as to feature Fellini in a cameo. Bob Fosse used it as a touchstone for his reasonably entertaining exercise in navel-gazing, All That Jazz. And while Terry Gilliam has never referenced 8 1/2 quite as blatantly as the above examples, Gilliam would seem to be the spiritual successor to Fellini’s uniquely chaotic approach to film.
With regards to Adaptation, it’s pretty clear that both Jonze and screenwriter Charles Kaufman are both familiar with the work of Fellini, but Kaufman manages to put enough of his own spin on the basic premice of 8 1/2 to make it his own. Where Fellini uses the character of the critic to mock his own intentions throughout the film (not coincidentally de-clawing any future criticism of the movie itself - I betcha Antonioni was kicking himself for not thinking of that one first), Kaufman comes up with the masterful idea of a fictional twin brother, using him as the voice of artistic mediocrity. I like the device because it plays into the structure of the movie, with it’s twinnings of real/unreal, truth/fiction, success/failure, etc.
Still, there’s nothing in Adaptation that comes close to my favourite scene in 8 1/2, where Guido fantasizes himself in the House of Women. Very rarely has an artist laid out his libido so plainly on the screen. Fellini, with customary skill, manages to draw the scene from farce to horror to humour to, finally, a bittersweet longing. In my opinion, it’s the very heart of Fellini as an artist.
