his passage comes well into a very long poem which I doubt the character Mary would have memorized. The audience needn't know that; many may know no more than she does when she calls the author Pope Alexander. She quotes as she's trying to impress a boss she loves. Kaufman has that knack of painlessly explaining his subject right there on the screen. Consider how much information about evolution he embeds in his screenplay for "Adaptation."

Kaufman, the most gifted screenwriter of the 2000s, is concerned above all about the processes of thought and memory. His screenplay for Spike Jonze's "Being John Malkovich" (1999) involved a way to spend 15 minutes inside the mind of another person. Michel Gondry's "Human Nature" (2001) is concerned about the Nature vs. Nurture theories of our behavior: Do we start this way, or do we learn it? Jonze's "Adaptation" (2002) contrasts the physical evolution of orchids (which assume fantastic forms to earn a living) with identical twins, one who writes from his nature and the other from his nurture. In George Clooney's "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" (2002), he shows the game show creator Chuck Barris leading a double life as a deadly CIA assassin (Barris believes this story is factual). Kaufman's first film as a director, "Synecdoche, New York" (2008), is his most challenging. He attempts no less than to …show more content…
Nothing is more fatal than an actor signaling that material is funny. That's for us to decide. To the character, it's his life, and there's nothing funny about it. Keaton never allowed himself a smile or a wink; Chaplin a few smiles, but too many. Jim Carrey in "Eternal Sunshine" is a sad sack throughout; John Cusack in "Malkovich" earnestly desires to do good, and Malkovich himself has made a career of probity; Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Synecdoche" desperately seeks to hold together his mental machinery (and the film itself is far from