Being John Malkovich a review by Christian Pyle
Directed by Spike Jonze Written by Charlie Kaufman Starring John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, and John Malkovich Official Sites: http://www.being-john-malkovich.com/ http://www.beingjohnmalkovich.com/ http://www.JMincorporated.com/ Grade: A
Unemployed puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) answers an ad for a file clerk with "fast hands." When he arrives at the building for his job interview, Craig finds that the company is located on Floor 7½. This floor is half the height of any other, so Craig (and everyone else) has to walk hunched over. During orientation, Craig meets Maxine (Catherine Keener), an alluring woman whom Craig pursues despite being married.
When one of his files drops behind a cabinet, Craig discovers a small door. He goes through it, crawls down a tunnel, and is flung into the mind of John Malkovich. Craig experiences the world as Malkovich for fifteen minutes and then falls from the sky into a ditch by the New Jersey Turnpike. When he tells Maxine about his adventure, she sees the potential for profit. They form a partnership to sell rides through the portal.
When Craig's wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) takes the trip, she emerges questioning her gender identity. Hearing this, the enigmatic Maxine gets the hots for Lotte and arranges to have a dangerous liaison with Malkovich when Lotte is in his head. Jealous, Craig plots to insert himself into Maxine and Lotte's relationship. Malkovich becomes, essentially, a strap-on dildo in a bizarre love triangle.
"Being John Malkovich" is the long-awaited feature debut of director Spike Jonze, who made a name for himself directing music videos for groups such as the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, and Weezer. The film lives up to expectations. Jonze's style is inventive and appropriately whimsical but doesn't draw undue attention to itself. Traveling down a rabbithole in the sky, Jonze offers us a postmodern, post-Freudian Wonderland. Particularly good are sequences in which Malkovich goes down the tunnel to confront a universe of himself and another where Lotte and Maxine rush through Malkovich's subconscious.
Charlie Kaufman's intellectually rich script offers the viewer much to ponder but demands little. You can enjoy it on it most basic level and have a very good time. However, the movie also creates the opportunity for deep thought and discussion about identity and states of being (discussions probably best undertaken with the mind-altering substance of your choice).
Among the cast, Malkovich and Diaz give especially strong performances. While most of his previous characters are calculating and creepy, Malkovich is surprisingly warm and sympathetic as himself. He's also not afraid to engage in physical comedy in scenes where Craig takes control of his body. Best known as the alluring Mary about which there was "something" that drew men to her, Diaz is cast against type as the plain wife Craig forsakes for Maxine, who seems to have that "something." (Even Lotte falls for her.) Diaz manages to bury her glamorous image and bring the complex Lotte to life.
So . . . why Malkovich? The movie stresses that the thrill of the going through the tunnel is being someone else-anyone else. That John Malkovich is a famous actor is unimportant. In fact, judging from the characters in the movie, Malkovich isn't all that famous; Maxine has never heard of him, and Craig can't name any of his movies. If we took a poll of actors people would like to be, John Cusack and Cameron Diaz would probably place much higher than their titular co-star, but the relative obscurity of Malkovich is just part of the wonderful quirkiness of this film.
Look for cameos by Charlie Sheen, Sean Penn, and Brad Pitt as themselves. Sheen's first appearance is one of the movie's funniest scenes.
Bottom line: Fresh and inventive, "Being John Malkovich" is a delight to the eyes and to the mind.
© 1999 Christian L. Pyle
Read my reviews and others at the Mad Review: http://www.madreview.com/main.html
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews