Wanting to Be `John Malkovich' by Homer Yen (c) 1999
How's this for a wild ride? Shoot down a darkened tunnel at an amazingly high speed. Experience a cathartic transformation as you take on the life of someone else for 15 awe-inspiring minutes. Finally, drop into a ditch by the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. No, it's not the newest ride at your nearby amusement park. Rather, it's a unique life-affirming journey that one can take by entering a strange portal. If you've ever wanted to get inside someone's head, particularly John Malkovich's, then this is the way to do it.
`Being John Malkovich' is a satisfyingly and sublimely rich film about the people we are and the people that we want to be. Who we are can be a gut-wrenching nightmare. For those like Craig (John Cusack), it's a self-affirmation of failure and a perpetual state of hopelessness. Slovenly dressed, lacking in charisma, and hoping to make it as a professional puppeteer, his life is one big dead end. `There's no need for a puppeteer in today's world,' he states. It doesn't matter that he's an excellent puppeteer (the sequences featuring puppets are astounding); he's a man who only wishes to escape from the confines of his dreary life. Equally dreary is his loveless marriage to wife Lotte (an unrecognizable Cameron Diaz). Whatever magic they once had has faded. Looking like inebriated victims that never left the 1960s, they emptily talk about having children while forcing themselves to seem interested in each other's events of the day. Lotte seems more interested in her pets, which include a loquacious parrot and a chimp that can untie knots. Meanwhile, it's time for Craig to get a job because his life as a street performer brings him more black eyes than quarters (the scene that makes this evident, featuring a nun and monk puppet is hilarious).
The ad that Craig answers brings him to LesterCorp, situated on the 7½ floor of a building where access requires you to press the elevator's emergency stop button at just the right moment. Then, you need to take the crowbar to force the doors open while the alarm rings loudly in the background. On this floor, the ceiling is only 5 feet high ‘to keep overhead low,' quips the company's President (Orson Bean). This work environment confines him even more, and it's no help that he's falling head over heels for Maxine (Catherine Keener), a strong-willed co-worker that flaunts her sexuality with as much chutzpah as her merciless belittlement of him. By this point, I think that I'd want to be anybody but him too.
However, he soon makes a tremendous discovery that not only may be the answer to his prayers, but also sets the film's enjoyably surreal tone. Craig discovers a portal that actually allows him to enter the mind of John Malkovich (Malkovich plays himself). By assuming this new body, all fears and disappointments are left behind. For him, this is the ultimate experience as both a puppeteer and as a man who desperately wants to leave his dismal life behind. But it also holds some interesting opportunities for Maxine, who wants to exploit it as a business, and Lotte, who finds it weirdly, sexually stimulating.
BJM is endlessly inventive and continues to surprise throughout while glazing the film with fresh ideas and sharp dialogue. I was especially impressed with a sequence where Malkovich enters his own brain to find out what he himself is really like. Director Spike Jonze deftly handles a complexly woven tapestry of ideas and manages to find a satisfying resolution to each. And I suspect that you'll be revisiting many of the ideas once you've left the theatre. Expect an Oscar nod for Best Film. Thank goodness this film wasn't called `Being Al Gore.'
Grade: A-
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