Gary Farmer is irked at the way Adaptation has turned out -- but, contrary to some gossip, he hasn't asked that his name be scrubbed from the credits.

Adaptation is the new movie (or should that be meta-movie?) from Spike Jonze, the creator of the astonishing Being John Malkovich, probably the best motion picture out of Hollywood in 1999. His latest creation, done with Malkovich scripter Charlie Kaufman, opens Dec. 6, and the advance buzz is good, phenomenal, in fact.

Farmer, the Canadian-born star of Dead Man and Powwow Highway, has a relatively modest part in the Jonze-Kaufman enterprise. He plays a Seminole named Buster Baxley who, in fact, is a real person from Florida, featured in Susan Orlean's 1999 non-fiction bestseller The Orchid Thief, based on an article she prepared for The New Yorker.

The book is largely about a real-life charismatic orchid breeder, John Laroche, who, with the help of some Seminoles, hit on a plan, ultimately thwarted, to poach rare wild flowers from a federally protected state preserve in the Everglades -- the preserve is situated inside Seminole land -- then clone them for glory and profit.

As you might expect from the folks who brought us John Malkovich, Orlean's book serves as just one element in Jonze's multilayered, self-reflexive cinematic "stew." Adaptation, in fact, is as much about Kaufman's agonized attempts to write a workable screenplay from Orlean's onion-layered reportage as it is about John Laroche's subterfuge in a high-stakes botanical subculture. But it's not a documentary: Nicolas Cage plays Kaufman (he also plays his twin brother, fellow writer Daniel Kaufman), while Chris Cooper (the psycho dad in American Beauty) is John Laroche and Meryl Streep, Susan Orlean.

In a phone conversation this week, Farmer said he had a wonderful time on set with the Spikemeister. "He's a great director . . . and I'd love to work with him again." However, having seen the completed film this month, he's disappointed with what's finally going up on the screen, particularly as it pertains to first-nations people.

Farmer was rather vague in pinpointing where his objections lay. But they seem to have to do with the Jonze/Kaufman depiction of the Seminoles as dope-smoking, drug-running criminals who wrap these activities in nature-loving rhetoric.

Whether this depiction is the fictional conceit of an unhinged screenwriter driven to reducing a complex, real-life story to a Cheech-and-Chong cartoon, or, in fact, a kind of approximation of "the truth" remains to be seen.

Regardless, it's given Farmer, a Cayuga from the Iroquois Confederacy, pause. "I'm unhappy with the depiction of the Seminole people as it now stands in the film," he said. "If that was my tribe or my nation up there, I'd be upset." Jonze and Kaufman probably "look at it as fiction . . . but we're the ones who get the repercussions of that."

Farmer said he'd love to have a Seminole take on Adaptation because, hilariously enough, no Seminoles were cast for it. One of his fellow Seminoles in the film is, in fact, Navajo, the other from South America. "You see, there's all this cultural appropriation even in our own community!"

Still, "my name's not going to come off the film," he said with a sigh. "And I don't want to lose Spike as a friend. What's a guy to do?"
The world's most expensive Old Masters painting, Peter Paul Rubens's The Massacre of the Innocents, will have its first public display in London's National Gallery next March or April.

The painting was purchased for $117-million in July at an auction in England by veteran Canadian art collector Kenneth Thomson -- not, as it turns out (and as was reported here and in other media), by his son, fellow art collector David, as a gift of sorts for dad.

As everyone now knows, the Rubens, dating from around 1611, eventually will be housed in Toronto in the revamped Art Gallery of Ontario, currently being designed by Frank Gehry.

In the meantime, the painting, attributed at one time to a Rubens contemporary, Jan van den Hoecke, is being prepared for hanging alongside another Rubens epic, Samson and Delilah (circa 1613), which the National Gallery bought in 1980 for what now seems a decidedly paltry $8-million. The Massacre of the Innocents,apparently the property of the royal house of Lichtenstein for at least a couple of centuries, spent much of the last century languishing in a darkened hallway of an Austrian monastery before its existence was brought to light about a year ago.
Plans by the Alberta government to undertake a $60-million to $80-million renovation of its two identical Jubilee Auditoriums in Edmonton and Calgary are throwing a big monkey wrench into the operations of those halls' major clients.

Each auditorium, erected and financed entirely by Ernest Manning's Social Credit government in 1955, is supposed to undergo a mammoth, year-long rehabilitation, starting in 2004, with a reopening to coincide with province's centennial in 2005. Ralph Klein's Tories have yet to announce just how much of the cost of the renos they'll cover (each auditorium, which has about 3,000 seats, is run by an arms-length Crown agency).

Regardless, it means troubles ahead for the Edmonton Opera Association, Alberta Ballet Company and Calgary Opera,not to mention graduation ceremonies of the province's two major universities and such community staples as the Kiwanis Music Festival.

The two opera organizations and the ballet company are busy thinking about acceptable alternative venues and devising programs that fit those venues. It's going to be a costly exercise and whatever solutions are reached, each organization is hoping it will still have enough subscribers and artists on hand when they return to the restored auditoriums. Not surprisingly, they've approached the government for additional financial assistance to help with the myriad expenses associated with the disruptions ahead.

Alberta Ballet is perhaps in the most precarious position because it has had a mandate since 1990 to perform in both Calgary and Edmonton. One programming possibility is that annual chestnut The Nutcracker -- except for 2004 performed in Edmonton's Skyreach Centre, home of the Oilers hockey club, and the Pengrowth Saddledome, the Calgary Flames' arena.

"We'd have to do it as we've never done it before, as a total spectacle," Ann Lewis, the ballet's executive director, acknowledged this week. Thankfully, she said, the ballet's artistic director, Jean Grand-Maître, has worked with the ultra-show-bizzy Cirque du Soleil and knows ice-skating choreography.
jadams@globeandmail.ca