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"The killer is a literature professor. He cuts little chunks from people's bodies. He calls himself the Deconstructionist."

Adaptation, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's follow-up to the critically acclaimed and really rather brilliant Being John Malkovich, puts front and center the pair's now-trademark loopiness, but frankly it's starting to feel like a put-on, often registering as calculated and cynical rather than genuinely spontaneous. You can only coast on the shock value of the non sequitur for so long (and this, coming from the person who thinks that the non sequitur is the pinnacle of humor).

This isn't to say that the novelty of their approach has already worn off. Kaufman and Jonze have enough brazenly original ideas, thank God, that Adaptation works quite beautifully despite its perverse, indirect familiarity. The movie combines Kaufman's affinity for the throwaway gag with a story that's much weightier than the thematically potent but superficially frivolous ditty that was Malkovich. There is, again, a central gimmick, one that is (probably unintentionally) taken from the virtually unseen Dutch movie The Sea That Thinks: a screenwriter faced with a herculean task of adapting an unadaptable novel winds up writing himself into the script.

The protagonist is none other than Kaufman himself, and the film is rumored to have been inspired by his own struggles to write an adaptation of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief for the screen. He's played here by Nicolas Cage, made to look fat, balding and altogether miserable. Twice as neurotic as any given Woody Allen character, Kaufman goes through countless devastatingly self-punishing internal monologues whenever he gets anywhere near a reasonably attractive female.

After the runaway success of his Being John Malkovich, Kaufman -- and I'm still talking about the character here -- is assigned The Orchid Thief, and considers it his Very Important Project: he wants to write a movie about flowers, plain and simple, without any of the idiotic story conventions that Hollywood so constantly and wholeheartedly embraces. His moronic-but-sincere twin brother Donald, who wants to take after his brother and attends a screenwriting workshop, which inspires him to write a serial killer movie in which the killer, the cop and the poor imprisoned damsel are actually the same schizophrenic person; Charlie pointedly asks how the hell it's even possible to write that.

Before the desperate Kaufman even has a chance to confuse everyone by adding himself as a character in the script, Jonze starts intercutting his story with his screenplay, which tells of Susan Orlean's (Meryl Streep) relationship with one John Laroche (Chris Cooper), a man who spends his time in the Everglades illegally removing endangered species of orchid; that is, when he isn't running his amateur porn site. He is missing all of his top front teeth -- we later learn of the gruesome way this happened -- but isn't in the least self-conscious about it, and it is in part this nonchalance to everything pertaining to himself that so beguiles Orlean. Kaufman also fantasizes scenes from her personal life, fleshing her character out in his head until everything explodes in the film's last act.

There's a lot to work with here, and Adaptation subtly touches on a plethora of themes. Chief among these is the concept of "adaptation" in the literary sense vs. the evolutionary, which the script brings up on a number of occasions. Indeed, Kaufman "adapts" to the task of his impossible adaptation in the aforementioned way, but curiously, the movie mostly ignores this, losing the idea in the hustle and bustle of its third act. (Though another interpretation that comes to mind is that the third act is indeed the fruition of this very idea, which would pretty neatly dismantle that last criticism; can't go into detail, of course, without becoming a nasty, rotten spoiler, but it is exactly this sort of ambiguity that makes the movie a gem.)

I mentioned that Jonze and Kaufman are starting to seem a bit too calculatingly kooky, and the first half of the film, at least, tends to confirm this suspicion. The movie begins on the set of Being John Malkovich with Kaufman nervously looking on as Malkovich himself lectures the crew on expediency (no way of telling whether or not this is actual set footage), and my first reaction was to groan at the obviousness of the corny stunt. There are other moments throughout the movie in which their efforts to make us shake our heads in puzzlement are a bit too obviously at the forefront of their filmmaking.

There's a wonderful self-referential line that proves, non-coincidentally, to be prophetic: a character mentions that when writing a script, it doesn't much matter what you do in the first two acts, but "wow them in the end, and you've got a hit." And Adaptation does exactly that, with a series of third act plot twists that shift the movie into a completely different genre. It proves that even if their deranged clown act is beginning to wear thin, the dynamo of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman can still shock and "wow" us into submission.