This movie is by turns painful, funny, gripping, painful, horrifying, painful, and breathtaking. If you like self-referential, metaphor-laden, clever innovations in filmmaking, then you’ll love this movie. It starts out slow, pedestrian: yet another Nicholas Cage angsty existential crisis. But then it picks up speed. By the end it was roaring along and pushing the limits of my credulity in a completely gripping way. I’ve never been much of a Nicholas Cage fan—his roles tend to be too homogeneous, too flat, with too little to care about. But he impressed me with this one: there’s complexity, there’s discovery, and he’s interesting. An audience with more movie savvy than me might pick up on what the opening’s literal segue from Being John Malkovich is saying about the connection between this film and reality; it wasn’t until I picked up the DVD case after the movie was done that I realized that Charlie Kaufman, the main character in this movie, who is writing a book screenplay adaptation that is the movie, really is a real person. And so’s the book’s author, Susan Orlean. For that matter, the book is a real book, and this adaptation really is an adaptation, on several wonderful levels.