Cinema Uprising by Steve Evans
Being John Malkovich Dir: Spike Jonze. Starring John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener and John Malkovich.
The pitch: A puppeteer reluctantly takes a job with a bizarre company on the 7 ½ floor of a NYC office tower, where he discovers a secret door leading into the mind of actor John Malkovich.
Got that? Here’s a wildly inventive, completely crazy satire of celebrity obsession -- spiced with a quest for eternal life, adultery and betrayal, madness and gender confusion. And, gulp, it’s the funniest movie of the year.
Being John Malkovich almost defies description. First-time screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s delightfully demented tale unfolds like a hallucination that could have been penned by Lewis Carroll under heavy medication. We guarantee the gentle readers of Cinema Uprising have never seen anything like this. They probably never will again.
Cusack is a sensitive puppeteer whose skills just aren’t in high demand, although he blames his lagging career on “this wintry job climate.� His loopy wife (Diaz), is devoted to a menagerie of house pets - a dog, assorted cats, a neurotic chimpanzee (the monkey’s problem stems from a childhood “incident,� we are told), an iguana, an aquarium of tropical fish and an obnoxious cockatoo. The noise in their one-bedroom apartment could push anyone over the edge.
Diaz tells her brooding husband that he needs to find a real job. Responding to a cryptic classified ad, he takes the elevator of an office building to the 7 ½ floor - yes, the elevator stops between the 7th and 8th levels. Scrambling into the hallway, he discovers that the ceilings are only five feet tall. Everyone walks hunched over, turning their heads sideways to talk, like Quasimodo in the Hunchback of Notre Dame. The explanation behind the construction of this floor is just as preposterous and equally funny. Cusack ambles down the hall, puzzled, looking as though he’s just popped down a rabbit hole. The receptionist talks in gibberish and confuses his legitimate questions with sexual harassment. Flummoxed, he’s ushered in to meet the boss, a mysterious doctor who doesn’t explain the company’s business, but offers his new employee a position in the filing department.
The job’s a snore, but Cusack takes an immediate liking to co-worker Maxine (Keener), a shark in a woman’s business suit. She doesn’t think much of the scruffy puppeteer, but gets the hots for his wife. Diaz is equally smitten with Maxine.
As if that wasn’t enough trouble, Cusack discovers a tiny door behind a filing cabinet at work. The portal opens to a narrow corridor, dripping with mud and effluvia. He crawls inside and is propelled, as though riding a water slide, through some sort of metaphysical corridor that deposits him into the mind of Oscarïƒ'-nominated actor John Malkovich. Cusack sees the world through the eyes of Malkovich for precisely 15 minutes before he is ejected, falling from the sky by the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. It’s an inspired bit of lunacy.
The time limit inside the actor’s mind is no doubt a reference to Andy Warhol’s comment that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.
Exhilarated, Cusack tells Maxine of his trip inside Malkovich. She smells a business opportunity. Who wouldn’t pay to be someone else - anybody else - for 15 minutes? The fact that it’s a celebrity only sweetens the deal.
Soon customers are queued up along the office hallway, waiting to pay $200 each for a ride inside the famous actor. Cusack persuades his wife to give it a try. Diaz slips inside the portal, but only after Maxine arranges a date with Malkovich. That way, while she’s inside the actor’s mind, Diaz is able to indulge her fantasies with Maxine. She can be a man seducing a woman. The new perspective is intoxicating. After Cusack picks her up by the turnpike, Diaz declares that she either wants a sex-change or to be a lesbian. Doesn’t matter which. It’s hard to convey the hilarity of this scene, which is best experienced first-hand, as a small comic miracle that keeps building as Cusack does a slow burn.
Malkovich is superb playing not so much himself, but perhaps the public perception of who he is - a quiet man given to contemplation and understated elegance. The supporting players are likewise marvelous, especially Diaz, who seems to take delight in hiding her beauty behind a challenging role. Cusack is always fun to watch, although this may be his best role since Grosse Pointe Blank (1997). He fully realizes the controlling nature of his character â€` after all, for a guy who loves to pull the strings of marionettes, what could be more satisfying than crawling inside another person’s brain and making him do tricks?
First-time feature director Jonze, who is best known for shooting music videos, has a fractured way of looking at the world. It’s as though he was peering at his characters through a prism of broken glass -- the different facets of their personalities never throw the same reflection twice. They’re unpredictable. As such, we feel off-balance in an amusing way, like exploring a funhouse with warped mirrors and tilted floors.
Being John Malkovich belongs on any top 10 list for 1999. For all its lunacy, this unique picture merits serious Academy Award consideration. It is audacious, anarchic and outrageously funny filmmaking. Catch it quick. We will not see its kind again.
Rated R for language, sexual situations.
Cinema Uprising copyright C 1999 by Stephen B. Evans. All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means, without the prior, written permission of the author.
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