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Directed by Spike Jonze
Starring John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, Orson Bean, John Malkovich
USA, 1999
Rated R (language and sexuality)
Major elements are revealed in this review. You have been warned.
THE WACKY AND THE SUBTLE
Music videos have always been an art. I don’t think people realize that. How can you finish watching Madonna and Mark Romenak’s "Rain," with its visual perfection, and tell me it isn’t art? Or R.E.M.’s "Everybody Hurts" (which reportedly borrows from Fellini’s 8½). A masterpiece of a music video is even rarer than a masterpiece film, though, maybe because the art’s lifetime has been relatively short as of now, or because the fusion of music and imagery is so difficult to make perfect. Over the years, Spike Jonze has proven to be an MTV generation’s genius. He is an endlessly inventive man who pulls every stunt, in his videos and for his enigmatic persona. Last year he directed the wildly successful, cheap, and hilarious Fatboy Slim clip, "Praise You," under the pseudonym of Richard Koufay, a hopelessly awful choreographer leading a fictitious dance group named Torrence. He is an artist born of hilarity and anyone who’s followed his video career knows he is one.
This year, he ventured into the world of movies, first making his acting debut in Three Kings, then crafting a little feature of his own called Being John Malkovich. The latter film is an intensely inventive, non-stop kaleidoscope of creativity. I’ve never seen anything like it. It isn’t bringing on a cinema revolution with it or a new film movement because it is too unique to have duplicates. There has never been a movie like Being John Malkovich and, I’m pretty sure, there will never be one like it again. It manipulates sound and imagery and it throws in all these twists and turns. The movie is one thrill after another; a roller-coaster without the unpleasant nausea. The screen is busy with ingenuity, but Spike Jonze, being his quirky, boyish self, doesn’t take a grain of it seriously. He doesn’t take himself seriously as an artist, making Being John Malkovich a most delicious exercise in how far a screenplay, a director, a crew, and a cast can go. Jonze nonchalantly pushes sanity and ordinariness off the edge.
In the film, Craig (John Cusack), a street puppeteer, pines to be successful with his artistry and for the income he just doesn’t have. He stages lewd puppet shows in New York streets, ones of lust and complete abandon and is punched in the face by a parent whose child is watching the display of kinky puppet sex. His wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), is an animal freak and their apartment is practically a jungle. The two long for the day when they can live in financial peace.
Craig looks for work in the papers and takes a job on the 7½th floor of a building. The ceiling is so low that employees have to stoop themselves. He meets a number of colorful people at his new job as a filer (he has fast hands), among them being a secretary (or, as Craig’s employer insists she be called, a "liaison") who is as bizarre as the film and seems to enjoy twisting people’s words (Mary Kay Place); Lester (Orson Bean), the employer who claims to have a speech impediment that he clearly does not have; and Maxine (Catherine Keener), Craig’s sexy coworker who seems ready to cut off the head of anyone who even seems like he is coming on to her. The 7½th floor is a work of designing genius: it becomes this fairytale setting in the film and it colors every scene featuring it with a misshapen, violently strange quality over the otherworldly atmosphere Jonze established in the film in the first frame.
Craig tries to court Maxine, a hard-edged and slick femme fatale with a cynical attitude. She meets him at a bar and is so straightforward, Craig is embarrassed. "Are you married?" she interrogates slyly. When he says yes, she continues to prod him with questions on her physical allure and his sexual orientation. He tells her he is a puppeteer and, feeling she does not want a relationship with a grown man who plays with ‘dolls,’ she tells the bartender, "Check, please."
Being John Malkovich is teeming with visual details and fantasy brilliance. It is some sort of mixture of Terry Gilliam and those glorious Alice in Wonderland and The Phantom Tollbooth books and that type of nonsensical richness, but it all belongs to its creators. It’s no homage. Its creativity and swirling, thrilling imagination is completely unique.
On top of what’s already been established in Being John Malkovich, which, in itself, could serve as the basis for a very good film, Craig drops a paper behind a filing cabinet and, when he tries to retrieve it, he comes across a door… a portal into John Malkovich’s brain! He crawls in and is soon sucked inside. He is seeing through Malkovich’s eyes now. The design of Malkovich’s brain/portal is impressive: it’s like a tunnel under the ground, full of mud. For 15 minutes, Craig is no longer a lowly filer, but one of the most enigmatic actors in the world eating breakfast. He’s then spit out onto the New Jersey Turnpike.
And then there’s more. Craig, who is obsessed with Maxine, tells her about the portal. She only half believes him but puts an ad in the paper claiming her new company, J.M., Inc., can provide the experience of being someone else for 15 minutes. People start to line up to pay $200 to get into Mr. Malkovich’s brain. There’s a brutally funny and perfect scene in which Craig and Lotte have invited Maxine for dinner. They sit on the couch, surrounded by cages of chimps, parakeets, and lizards. Both Craig and Lotte are sexually obsessed with Maxine and, when the goddess begins ranting about the virtues of being a go-getter, the two snap and begin to kiss her passionately, at the same time. Maxine slaps Craig and informs Lotte that she’s smitten with her.
Maxine has begun seeing John Malkovich and, in a perverted twist, Lotte goes into the portal while the two have sex. Being John Malkovich begins blurring the lines of reality and fantasy and the whole movie becomes a virtual reality ride. Lotte experiences sex with Maxine through Malkovich’s body. Craig locks Lotte up so he can go into the portal and experience the same thing.
And, no, it doesn’t end there. Just when the film seems it is about to explode from so many treats and slick schemes, it adds another, and another, and another… Being John Malkovich becomes a farcical butchering of sexual complexity, identity, and consciousness. But these messages don’t even matter in the world Spike Jonze has created with writer Charlie Kaufman. Being John Malkovich is a crazy experience that doesn’t allow a breath.
John Cusack gives his best performance as the down-and-out puppeteer and Cameron Diaz, once the beautiful blonde in There’s Something About Mary, is now a twisted brown-haired woman. Catherine Keener is a scene-stealer: she is a seductive snake who is as business-oriented as she is conniving. Orson Bean and Mary Kay Place act like oblivious lunatics with such comic proficiency. And then there’s John Malkovich who gives the most awe-inspiring performance of all as himself. When Craig possesses him, he acts as Craig-Through-Malkovich’s-Body without flaw.
Being John Malkovich overflows with inventiveness and incorporates a liquefaction of Baroque and MTV looniness (not only is Spike Jonze a music video director, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe serves as producer). It also has a blue mustiness that suggests a Salvador Dali-Luis Bunuel collaboration. The film is a cinematic myriad of fun and twistedness, but it never feels like it’s too much. It seems like Kaufman and Jonze’s ideas are limitless, enough to span several good films. There’s a scene in which John Malkovich enters his own portal and, while it is such an unthinkable idea that defies every law of science, it is one of the most inspired gags of several off-the-wall ideas. Sometimes the movie becomes a tad unsteady and uneven, but such can be expected from a film with so much to offer, you have to literally lie down after the experience to let it all sink in. Spike Jonze seems to see it as a sort of lampoon or an on-going joke, and it does seem that way, only it is the best joke I’ve seen in a long time.
By Andrew Chan
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