If you haven't read the book AND seen the movie, GO BACK TO THE SHORT REVIEW.

This is the long review, and it contains MAJOR SPOILERS. Trust the Otter, you really do want to read this marvelous book first, and then see what they do with it in the movie, and THEN come back and read my review.

No hurry, I'll be waiting right here. We'll have lots to talk about.

<looks at watch>

You back yet? Good.

Ottersis and I were in Florida, and she had brought this knowing that I had read and loved the book, and that I had spent the day driving through the areas the book talks about. She really likes this movie, and will probably not be happy that I have decided that I didn't. But she's a good sister and will not be mad at me for making my own decision, no matter how wrong she thinks I am...

So firstly, it was a great book, full of interesting stuff about John Laroche, who gives whole new meanings to the concept of white trash, but who is a fascinating character. Orlean does a wonderful job of bringing the history of not only orchids and orchid hunting but Laroche's life and the history of Florida and several other places alive.

And then there's this movie. The only other movie I have seen about the difficulty of making an unfilmable book into a movie is Tristram Shandy; I expected this to be something like that, parts of the book being filmed and a lot of discussion of how unfilmable it is.

And was I ever wrong!

Firstly, as wonderful as the book was, it did seem to me to be unfilmable: a bunch of tangentially related vignettes about people, places and plants. Getting around that by making the movie actually be about the poor schmuck who has to turn this unfilmable book into a screenplay was a brilliant idea, and casting ex-Serious Honey Nicholas Cage as both the screenwriter and his loser twin brother worked brilliantly.

Meryl Streep was, as always, superb, and Chris Cooper as the lowlife ne'er-do-well Laroche was just amazing. There were so many good things about this movie: the double-entendre of the title, the acting, even Cage's self-pitying whining was good. I also enjoyed the way that during the movie they managed to break every rule they laid down for 'don't do this in a movie', finally giving the game away in the last scene.

You'd think this would be a real winner.

And yet. For some reason, it wasn't.

I think I partly had trouble with the fact that they were completely destroying the line between real and unreal, not to give the viewer some kind of vision or illumination or knowledge, but just for the hell of it. "Look, we can play with your mind like THIS!" was the feeling I got. And unlike the movie Being John Malkovich, which had some wonderful thoughtful things to say about the nature of subjective reality, this had the feeling of frat boys pushing each other to see how far they could go with the characters.

I really didn't like the way that, by the end, the writer (Susan Orlean) and her subject, Laroche, lived out a fantasy of their real lives (and was actually wondering about lawsuits...evidently so were the producers.) But this deliberate mishmosh of fact and fiction just didn't work for me- it was too self-conciously clever, I think, and had me saying, Huh? a lot.

So yes, I know it's a VERY FAMOUS MOVIE and has WON AWARDS and GARNERED CRITICAL ACCLAIM. Not my cup of tea, sorry. And I wonder how many people were kept from reading that truly wonderful book by the fact that it's NOT anything like the movie, but is instead full of SCIENCE AND HISTORY AND GOOD WRITING? Sad, I call it.

So for goodness' sake, read the book. If you must, see the movie, it is interesting and it does have moments. Just don't expect it to be brilliant.