For much of the movie, you are watching a single actor portray a prickly, tender sibling dynamic with himself, and yet after a while this astonishing feat seems as matter of fact as color film or synchronized sound which were once, of course, astonishments in their own right.
Whether or not Donald Kaufman really exists and there is not much evidence, other than this movie, that he does , he and his brother embody the antithetical impulses that haunt any writer. He wears his terrible awkwardness -- with his would-be girlfriend Cara Seymour , with a willowy producer Tilda Swinton , with himself -- like a badge of authenticity. The hapless Donald, who is freeloading at his twin's house, appears happily shallow and serenely untroubled by such concerns.
Although Charlie ridicules Donald's use of movie industry jargon ''Don't say industry,'' he snaps , Donald decides to try his hand at screenwriting. While his brother tears out his hair over ''The Orchid Thief,'' Donald churns out a serial-killer script so utterly derivative as to be a sure-fire six-figure sale and sparks a happy, bawdy romance with a makeup technician played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. He also attends seminars conducted by the screenwriting guru Robert McKee, whose rigorously structural approach to storytelling Charlie disdains.
Later, in desperation, Charlie will turn to McKee, ripely impersonated by Brian Cox, for salvation, and will get an earful of self-help exhortation. Meanwhile, Susan Orlean played with impish composure by Meryl Streep falls in with Laroche Chris Cooper , a haunted, antic autodidact who has been arrested for poaching rare orchids from a Florida swamp.
The contrast of their backgrounds and temperaments, hinted at in Ms. Orlean's book, is wittily realized by Ms. Streep and Mr. Cooper, whose lank-haired, toothless charisma also resonates with Mr. Cage's improbable magnetism.
As the stories unfold in counterpoint, seesawing back and forth in time, ideas pop up like flowers blossoming crazily in time-lapse photographs. It would be futile to try to account for all of them, but the effect is both exhilarating and a little stressful, like a graduate seminar in philosophy conducted by a slightly mad professor, and then edited down into an extralong episode of MTV's ''Real World.
After it's over, you will want to keep arguing about it, if only in the relative safety of your own brain. The last part -- what McKee's acolytes might call the ''third act'' -- stages a formal death match between Donald's approach to storytelling and Charlie's, and sends Orlean and Laroche on to adventures undreamed of in the pages of The New Yorker though they are, by Hollywood standards, perfectly predictable.
Some may find the ending rushed, inconclusive or cynical. I thought its lack of easy resolution was proof of the film's haphazard, devil-may-care integrity, and its bow to conventional sentiment a mark of sincerity. At one point in ''The Orchid Thief,'' Ms. Orlean asks a park ranger named Tony why he thinks people find orchids so seductive. His answer matches both the nonchalance and the insight of this remarkable, impossible film: ''Oh, mystery, beauty, unknowability, I suppose.
It is Orlean's first book-length narrative after two collections, the first one short pieces about New England, the second portraits of Americans celebrating Saturday night. It shows her gifts in full bloom, as well as the challenges, even for such a talented journalist, of writing at this length.
The thief of the title is John Laroche, ''skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. Laroche, along with three Seminole assistants, had been caught as they emerged from southern Florida's Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, a vast swamp, carrying four pillowcases containing more than rare orchids and bromeliads. He planned to clone them by the millions, he explained to the arresting officers, and then sell them to collectors around the world.
As he awaited trial, Orlean decided to hang out with Laroche and learn about him and his world. With her picaresque hero as guide, she is led into the strange society-in-miniature of orchid collectors and propagators. This sort of place is exactly where Orlean likes to be, and soon her terrarium is filled with orchid maniacs like Laroche's pal Dewey Fisk, whose business, the Philodendron Phreaque, is run out of his house on ''one of those old Florida roads with rain ruts and grassy edges, and rows of one-floor bungalows with screened porches and dead cars and dead bicycles and dead appliances lying out in the open to molder, the way the Seminoles lay out their dead.
And the swells at Miami's American Orchid Society gala, where Orlean leans against the wall with the black-tied, orchid-loving Earl of Mansfield ''His wife had impressed me in the receiving line because she was so pretty and her hands felt like baby powder''. Laroche is not a gala benefit type of guy, and he vanishes during this and other long stretches of the book.
This is not all bad, because though Orlean is marvelous at describing her wing nut and his esthetic and moral world, there is not nearly enough of him to fill a book. Orlean appears to know this and digresses in long passages into several areas suggested by Laroche and his passion. Laroche had planned to clone the orchids and then sell them for a small fortune to impassioned collectors. After he was caught in the act, Laroche set off one of the oddest legal controversies in recent memory, which brought together environmentalists, Native American activists, and devoted orchid collectors.
The result is a tale that is strange, compelling, and hilarious. That passion is captured with singular vision in The Orchid Thief, a once-in-a-lifetime story by one of our most original journalists. Here are some Orchid Thief book covers from around the world.
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