DIRECTOR
Spike Jonze
SCREENWRITER
Charlie Kaufman
PRODUCERS
Steve Golin
Vincent Landay
Sandy Stern
Michael Stipe
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Lance Acord
MUSIC
Carter Burwell
EDITOR
Eric Zumbrunnen
CAST
John Cusack (Craig Schwartz)
Cameron Diaz (Lotte Schwartz)
Catherine Keener (Maxine) John Malkovich (John Horatio
Malkovich)
Orson Bean (Dr. Lester)
Mary Kay Place (Floris)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 113m
U.S. release: October 29, 1999
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
Other Spike
Jonze films
reviewed on this website:
- Adaptation
|
The
intricately funny Being John Malkovich, a funhouse-mirror
fable of perception and experience, works on our senses more
effectively than any movie in years. When our protagonist, hangdog
puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusack), and his dishevelled,
animal-loving wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) are talking in their
kitchen, it feels like an authentic cramped kitchen in a low-rent
apartment -- you can almost smell the lingering odor of cheap
spaghetti sauce, the smothering essence of animal fur (the Schwartzes
own a dog, a chimp, and a parrot). At the hunchbacked offices
where Craig works as a file clerk -- on the 7 1/2th floor, where
the ceilings are about five feet high -- you feel the 9-to-5
oppressiveness physically literalized. It's the inverse of those
fantastic high ceilings in Brazil, which made the worker
drones seem small; here, the offices reduce the actual stature
of the workers, and you imagine the neckaches and backaches you'd
suffer after an eight-hour day.
This is the world set up for us by writer Charlie Kaufman and
director Spike Jonze, both making their feature debuts (Jonze
has directed many MTV videos and appeared as the cheerful redneck
soldier in Three
Kings). The movie proper begins in Craig's "workshop"
-- a tiny space where he makes and practices with his puppets
-- and the whole movie is a workshop. Throughout, we're made
conscious of the fact that we're watching a puppet show, with
actors saying lines, and yet we're drawn into their suffering
and triumphs, as we are when we glimpse Craig's puppetry. (An
indication of the filmmakers' generosity of spirit: Craig is
presented as fairly self-absorbed and faintly pompous, but his
work itself is quite accomplished.) Kaufman and Jonze push artifice
far but not too far: The weirdness is always rooted in drab reality,
the outsize emotional shifts always defined by plausible motives.
The filmmakers are sly enough to know why we go to movies --
to be someone else, passively, vicariously, feel what they feel
-- and the movie itself proceeds from that premise.
And perhaps the largest irony in a movie full of them is that
probably no moviegoer in history has ever sought to feel what
John Malkovich feels -- the cold sardonic hipster, the mystery
man, the moral blank who keeps you at arm's length and laughs
at you for watching him. Malkovich makes it impossible for us
to enjoy him except at a considerable distance. So of course
he's the perfect marionette for this mad puppet show. Behind
a heavy file cabinet at work, Craig discovers a portal into the
head, the consciousness, of John Malkovich. The square hole suggests
a TV screen or movie screen; the portal is long and, well, womblike.
Craig crawls through the wet and muddy portal and is violently
sucked into Malkovich's everyday experiences for 15 minutes,
after which he is just as violently deposited -- from the sky
-- onto the ground outside the New Jersey Turnpike. (The Malkovich
ride removes you mentally and then physically.) After a while,
Maxine (Catherine Keener), an icy co-worker with whom Craig is
smitten, proposes that she and Craig start JM Inc. -- charging
people $200 for 15 minutes inside Malkovich. He becomes a "vessel"
-- an escape pod from the mundanity of life. Never mind that
most of his experiences, when experienced by JM Inc.'s clientele,
are just as mundane.
In recent years, I'd grown a bit impatient with Malkovich's imperiously
noncommittal performances. He seemed to use the same fey, dead
voice in every role; what was new and refreshing in The Killing
Fields and Empire of the Sun had grown familiar by
the time of Con
Air and Portrait
of a Lady, where Malkovich was merely using his cerebral
creepiness to cash easy checks playing bored, jaded villains.
(Judging from the footage I've seen, he does it again in the
upcoming The Messenger.) I'd just about counted him out
as an interesting actor when he surprised me last year with his
playful turn as Teddy KGB, the gambler with an accent as thick
as a brick, in Rounders.
Perhaps Malkovich had been bored in all those films, and his
boredom showed -- perhaps he needs more freaky parts like Teddy
KGB and, well, John Malkovich. His performance here thoroughly
humanizes him, opens him up to us and to himself, especially
when he's occupied by other people and we get to see his spasms,
his balking at a controlling puppetmaster consciousness, and
finally his complete subjugation to someone else's personality.
His childlike grin late in the movie when he announces to an
unimpressed audience, "I'm John Malkovich" -- when
really he isn't -- makes up for all the cool one-handed performances
he's turned in this decade.
Being John Malkovich will benefit greatly from repeat
viewings and fervent post-viewing deconstruction. Kaufman's screenplay,
chaotic and messy at first glance, is actually drum-tight in
its themes and metaphors. It's right on the cutting edge of gender
discussion, as seen in a lovemaking sequence that is perhaps
the oddest (and the funniest and most touching) menage a trois
ever put on film. Is Malkovich the only vessel? Can any of us,
like him, be vessels without knowing it? To some extent, we all
are; certainly all creative people are both vessels and puppeteers.
The movie is about -- among approximately 79 other things --
the creative exchange. When telling a story, we inhabit the characters
and see through their eyes, but they also inhabit us; and those
who are told the story also project themselves into the characters
and absorb them into themselves at the same time. BJM
triggers complex connections and then skips lightly to the next
thing; a movie that's outwardly "thoughtful" could
never be this thought-provoking. Like the Malkovich ride itself,
it's a fast and fun trip; only afterward do you appreciate where
it took you.
Some will say BJM goes on a bit past its natural conclusion.
Kaufman throws structure to the wind; an hour and a half into
the movie, he isn't shy about jumping ahead seven years or seven
months. Our internal clocks tell us the movie should be wrapping
up, tying up its loose ends; instead it expands and gets more
tangled. I like that; the movie works overtime, it plays its
loony self out right to the finish and beyond, when most movies
would be grabbing a smoke and heading for the climactic shootout
or tearful confrontation scene. (The climax of this movie, by
the way, has both. And much more.) Craig's quirky boss, the 105-year-old
Dr. Lester (Orson Bean in an irrepressible comic turn), is nearly
forgotten and then emerges in the third act as a major player,
acting as journeyman and metaphorical conscience for the embattled
Craig. Transgenderism is explored, toyed with and cast aside
-- it's just another way of escaping an old self. BJM
takes on a cosmic and rather serious tone in the second half
while losing little of its satirical bite. Our senses are no
longer engaged; it's a mind trip now. Craig begins to recede,
wondering to himself, "What have I become? My wife is in
a cage with a chimp." The inner and outer universes are
on a collision course, and there is much talk about "ripe
vessels" and eternal life. Women grapple in the primal mud
and rain outside the New Jersey Turnpike. The movie finishes
with a series of dazzlingly evocative yet simple images that
express both freedom and confinement, progression and submersion.
Being John Malkovich is a triumph for Spike Jonze, who
has distinguished himself as a rock-video artist mainly by not
dealing in the same tired flash-flash, Cuisinart gimmickry we
associate with MTV (and many of its graduates, like Alex Proyas).
His contribution here, it could be said, is to display little
or no style at all; he serves Charlie Kaufman's ideas, knowing
they're freaky enough without cinematic embellishment. A young
director who knows how to stay out of the way of a fine script
is, perhaps, more valuable -- and more durable in the long run
-- than a young director who sees a script as a series of hey-look-Ma-I'm-a-director
whizbang angles and smash-cuts. Yet there's a deadpan fizz of
surrealism around everything he does here. We're seeing through
the eyes of a filmmaker with an amiably skewed take on things,
along with a compassion that grants each character his or her
own awkward dignity and flaws. And he's working with a script
that allows him access to emotional complications and absurdities
that no conventional movie could touch. Being John Malkovich
reminds us why movies like this need to be made; at its best,
it reminds us that the medium hasn't lost its magic yet. There
are still new stories to tell, new portals to explore, new vessels
to inhabit. |