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Being
John Malkovich
viewed November 14, 1999 at Century Plaza 10
For full
information about this film, click
here
This would be a movie that would inspire hours of
contemplation if the experience of recollecting it
weren't so darn pleasurable. It raises questions
of sexuality, celebrity, mass media consciousness and
immortality, but in such an offhand, unassuming way that
the overabundance of discussion topics give way to a
happy, bewildered feeling of awe, as if someone has
entered a portal into your mind and set it aglow. You just enjoy
this movie for what it presents to you, so generously.
The wonderful script by Charlie Kaufman (whose
previous claim to fame was writing for "The Dana
Carvey Show" -- who would have figured?),
mixes criticism and pop so seamlessly that the
experience is unlike anything I've seen -- it's the
devastating feeling of being thoughtfully provoked and
thoroughly entertained all at once. Scenes are
loaded with both social meaning and wacky fun: out of a
ten-gallon hat stuffed with brilliant scenes from this
movie, I randomly pull out the one where Craig (John
Cusack), the self-pitying starving artist, performs his
beautifully crafted and perversely conceived puppet
version of "Abelard and Heloise" with the
forlorn correspondents carved in wood dry-humping before
the audience of one little girl and her enraged
father. Right there we've got a double-edged look
at the plight of performance artists, their lack of
recognition by the public commingled with an unhealthy
preoccupation with their tragic selves, with some arcane
literary theological history thrown in the
mix.
This movie runs the gamut of culture from high to
low, corporate to celebrity, metaphysical to
zoological. Director Spike Jonze (who must have
contributed to the brilliance of :"Three
Kings" in a role greater than his acting) unloads
his fertile vision on us, and we sit back in awe.
We have company orientation videos with fabricated
histories of pirates and midgets, traumatic chimpanzee
flashbacks, 50-foot puppet-shows, a woman having sex
with another woman through a man's body, and John
Malkovich entering the mind of John Malkovich.
Even the running gags -- the endlessly witty plays on
the word "Malkovich" and the shots of people
being spit through the sky onto the New Jersey Turnpike
-- elicited laughs from the rapt audience around me.
In many ways, this movie dares you to break it down
to its implicative components, by satirizing those with
an analytical disposition. After Craig leaves
Malkovich's mind, he can't help spewing out all sorts of
theories about the meaning of him occupying another's
consciousness that he's giddy with perplexity, a
sputtering profundity at his love-object, the
irresistibly power-driven Maxine (Catherine
Keener). All she cares about is whether she can
charge admission to this portal into Malkovich. As
representatives of the movie's mindset, Maxine's focus
on material results domineers over Craig's cerebral
ponderings. Everything else in the movie follows
this dynamic, and illustrates that abundant invention
and superb execution will make audiences credit you with
profound meaning to boot.
So much of this movie's superb execution rests on its
acting, and it's impossible to pick which is the best of
the four main performances. Cusack is both nuanced
and exaggerated as the self-pitying puppeteer -- from
his geeky speech patterns and his nihilistic leer, you
can see his soul slouching inside his mortal
shell. Catherine Keener is his opposite and sole
existential (or just plain sexual) tormentor, a woman so
deprecatingly confident that her smile has
"castrate you" written all over it. The
fact that she is exponentially sexier than Cameron Diaz
in this movie is not a letdown at all -- what we miss in
Diaz' frizzled hair and scrappy outfits we retrieve in a
wonderfully balanced, quirky and funny
performance. Recalling Geena Davis in her pre-jock
days, Diaz with her off-kilter voice and flailing limbs
is today's reigning screwball comedienne. The way
she embraces her newfound lesbian/transsexual identity
is, to say the least, inspiring.
Of course this movie wouldn't work without John
Malkovich, but his performance ensures that his presence
is more than just a gimmick. He works hard for his
title credit, half the time playing himself possessed by
others, the other half presenting a self that, authentic
or not, feels genuine, human and very... John Malkovich.
Each of these characters is seeking some kind of
powerful or special figure who enthralls them; each of
them except John Malkovich, who seems oddly, disarmingly
mundane,
and whose only desire is to be left alone and have a
happy, humdrum life. His personality is
really as banal as anyone's (a cab driver vaguely
recognizes him; he's ordering monogrammed towels and
poking at chinese takeout). These scenes however do take
on a thrilling quality when seen through malkovich's
eyes, capturing the visual and spiritual essence of what
cinema is all about. The heightened state of
seeing through another's eyes is further heightened by
the allure of celebrity; of not just seeing things, but
seeing them as somebody. But such
identities get turned on their ear when one realizes
that Malkovich is stylizing his presence as himself,
playing both with and against his enigmatic public
persona. Then there's Charlie Sheen, who is
unforgettable as he spoofs his own scandalized, tabloid
self. One wonders if another Charlie Sheen exists.
Like a lot of recent concept driven films (The
Truman Show, The Sixth Sense)., Being John
Malkovich invites a lot of probing into how
the movie's imagined world works. But this movie
enraptures you in ways the others could only dream
of. With a relentless invention triangulated by
cultural literacy, humor, and great acting, this movie
spins the mind into a world of unforeseen delights.
This movie inspired another online review search,
with the results as follows, in order of quality:
Village
Voice (short but packed with references, like the
movie itself)
Roger
Ebert
San
Francisco Examiner
Boston
Phoenix
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