Friday, May 16, 2008
Director Spike Jonze puts his brilliantly offbeat twist on the "15 minutes of fame" theory.
Oct 29, 1999 | How can you resist a movie that offers an actor as inherently enjoyable as John Malkovich the chance to play himself -- as a preening, perennially horny fop -- and then to play himself possessed by numerous other people, some of them vainer and more lustful than he? "Being John Malkovich" is the first produced screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, and it bears the mark of demented genius. This is a movie that adamantly refuses to observe the conventions of cinematic storytelling or succumb to real-world logic. It's a gleeful, nitrous-oxide high, midway between a Monty Python sketch and a Buquel film, with dreamlike structure and pseudoscientific charts to match. By the end, "Being John Malkovich" becomes so unhinged that its story loses all shape and direction -- but the tremendous craft and warped sensibility at work are so pleasurable that this really doesn't matter as much as it should.
Director Spike Jonze, best known for his music videos (and his fine acting job as the comic-relief redneck Vig in "Three Kings") has the good sense to contain this outrageousness with a low-key, naturalistic style. Except for the memorable scene when the character John Malkovich himself goes inside the head of the famous actor John Malkovich and encounters some kind of endless Malkovichian feedback loop, Jonze's debut feature sticks to a grimy, present-tense mode you might call kitchen-sink surrealism. Certainly the stringy-haired, unshaven and chronically unemployed puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) doesn't seem a likely candidate to uncover a portal into, um, wherever it is you go when you enter someone else's mind. Craig lives in a dreary New York basement apartment with his mousy wife, Lotte (yes, it's Cameron Diaz, wearing her hair in an unruly mop), and any number of her animals, including an abrasive parrot named Orrin Hatch and a chimp named Elijah.
One of the best things about "Being John Malkovich," to my mind, is that Jonze and Kaufman don't waste time making fun of these ordinary, unhappy people, who would certainly make easy targets. Craig is lazy and something of a loser (his erotic street puppetry sometimes gets him beaten up by irate parents), but his belief that he is an undiscovered genius is not treated as ridiculous -- in fact, what we see of his work with puppets is quite affecting. Lotte supports them both and obviously loves Craig, and suggests only in the gentlest, most considerate tones that he get a straight job until the marionette thing really takes off. But it's clear that the passion has slowly drained out of their marriage; by the time Craig answers a peculiar classified ad seeking a man with fast hands, Elijah seems to be the only member of the Schwartz household who's really enjoying life.
Things are not quite normal at LesterCorp, the shadowy "filing company" that becomes Craig's new employer. For starters, its offices are on the "seven-and-a-halfth floor" of a nondescript Manhattan commercial building -- a 5-foot-high crawlspace you can only reach by stopping the elevator between the seventh and eighth floors and prying the doors open with a crowbar. Why does this place exist? Craig watches a hilarious and deadly accurate '70s training film, featuring the washed-out colors and sweater-vest wardrobes of the era, which explains that the seven-and-a-halfth floor was created by an Irish sea captain so that leprechaun-sized office workers could have a space of their own.
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