I want to sit here and type witty, interesting, original ways of describing how badly I hate the ending of this movie. I want to explain to you the feeling in my stomach when I realized that Spike Jonze and company had hit the self-destruct button, the shiny, candy-like button, and were abandoning ship faster than the luxury cabins on the Titanic. I want to help you understand, but there's only so much I can say. See it yourself. You might admire its utter meaninglessness. You might get the joke and still think it's funny.

And yet, I can't hate the movie in general. Many times, a terrible ending has left me with hatred of an otherwise good movie like the taste of bad yogurt that won't wash out no matter how long I brush. That's a good one, huh? I think that, in honor of this movie, which is a circular commentary on its status as a movie, I'm going to offer compliments and criticisms of my review as I write it. Maybe at the end I'll blow up my computer. It would be a fitting homage.

OK. Every critic has already done this, but it's fun, so I'm going to join in. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who wrote Being John Malkovich, was hired to adapt Susan Orlean's bestselling nonfiction book The Orchid Thief into a movie. Finding it nearly unfilmable—it doesn't have a plot, many characters, character arcs, etc.—he grew desperate and found himself writing himself into the film. The script we see him write is a movie about how Charlie Kaufman, who wrote Being John Malkovich, was hired to adapt Susan Orlean's bestselling nonfiction book The Orchid Thief into a movie, except that he found it nearly unfilmable. And so on, and so on. It's not so much an adaptation of a book, it's a movie about the process of adapating a book. It's also about attempting to preserve something approaching a morality and a sense of self in the cutthroat movie industry.

Nicolas Cage plays Charlie Kaufman, as imagined for this film, as a sweating, neurotic, overweight chronic masturbator who is so full of self-doubt that he offers a running monologue in voiceover of his doubts and fears. And it's funny. Really funny. I found myself laughing throughout the first three-quarters of the movie, before the self-destruction. Having dabbled in writing myself, I could appreciate Kaufman's troubles, his staring endlessly at an empty page, his false starts, his battle with the big questions, such as "should I eat a muffin as a reward for finishing a page, or should it be as a jump-start?" Kaufman's professional life is harried by his producer Valerie (Tilda Swinton) and his agent Marty (Ron Livingston). His personal life is complicated by his twin brother Donald (also Nicolas Cage) and his girlfriend Amelia (Cara Seymour): he is in love with Amelia but is to paralyzed by his fears to act on it, and Donald is boisterous, likeable, and surprisingly good at writing blockbuster thrillers, all qualities that Charlie lacks.

We also get Susan Orlean's (Meryl Streep) story; well, sort of. We get Charlie Kaufman's version of her story. She was a New Yorker writer who wrote a piece on John Larouche (Chris Cooper), an orchid thief, a man who stole protected flowers from the swamps of Florida in order to breed them in an attempt to save them from extinction and get rich in the process. He's a boor, at least as portrayed in the movie. I haven't read the book, so I don't know what he is really like, except for the snippets Orlean reads in voiceover. He's a shameless self-promoter: he asks Susan who is going to play him, and then he suggests himself. Mostly because she's unhappy with her life, Susan falls in love with her unlikely subject, especially after he reveals the soft underbelly that is protected by his boisterous exterior.

Charlie is so desperate to finish his screenplay that he turns to screenwriting guru Robert McKee (Brian Cox) on the advice of his brother. He is a real person, a screenwriting guru who urges students to copy the formulas of successful movies. Donald followed his advice and sold his screenplay for a million bucks; Charlie is surprised by what he learns (or doesn't learn—you decide). I think I'm going to dispense with plot summary because the plot is both labyrinthine and utterly simple.

The performers: Nicolas Cage reminds us again that he is a good actor, a very good one. He plays two completely different characters here, fully realized people who are so themselves that we can always tell them apart, even when they are not talking. He's amazing to watch. Chris Cooper has a ball and is fun to watch as Larouche, the self-obsessed showman, who is entrancing because he is utterly shameless and complete. Meryl Streep gets to run the gamut of emotion in ways that I won't go into. Some of the people in this film are real people played by others, some by themselves, some are inventions—Donald Kaufman, who inhabits this film as fully as his brother and apparently helped write the screenplay (for this movie, not the movie within the movie), does not exist. It's all hard to keep track of, but it's not that important.

The movie, at least most of it, is a gift to film lovers. It works on many levels: as an entertaining comedy, as a big in-joke in which we are encouraged to pat ourselves on the back for getting the joke, as a drama about dealing with fear, etc. The performances are great, the script (at least most of it) is hilarious and thought-provoking... it's just that ending.

There are films with twist endings that make you have to rethink everything you have seen up to that point. Some of them were really good: The Usual Suspects, The Sixth Sense. It's a neat trick, very 1990s, but I think the time has come where the trick has played itself out. In an attempt to up the ante, Jonze and Kaufman have done something that is almost admirable in its audacity: they have crafted an ending that systematically destroys everything they have built up to this point. They have created a masterpiece (if you can call it that) of self-negation, an ending that breaks the rest of the movie into tiny pieces and then stomps on them, that slaps you in the face for everything you might have felt about the characters. It's a collossal in-joke, a hearty slap on the back for everyone in the know. It fails so completely that the wreckage was almost awesome. Like another acclaimed film of the holiday season, About Schmidt, it wants to have it both ways: it wants to be sentimental and sarcastic. It wants us to cackle at how clever it is while we're wiping our eyes. It doesn't work.

I have been in similar situations where I disliked a movie that was supposed to be brilliant or funny or whatever, where I was told that, "If you don't like it, it means that you don't get it." Jonze and Kaufman were counting on a reaction like that. Oh, I got it, all right. Maybe a little too well.