Being John Malkovich

Being John Malkovich




1999 - UK/USA - Fantasy Comedy/Workplace Comedy
A nerd (John Cusack), his self loathing sex change obsessed blowzy girlfriend (Cameron Diaz), and a heartbreakingly attractive star fucker (Catherine Keener), find a magical entrance into the head of the a movie star, where they can remain for fifteen minutes at a time and completely experience his inner state of happiness and contentment.

Classy, fascinating and entertaining, but for me it ended up rubbing in the cruelty of unrequited self- love. What a depressing message. These elitists have no idea how unpleasant it is to have our self esteem undermined, even temporarily. High school was bad enough.
So it ended up being a feel bad movie. Good, well paced, fascinating, enjoyable, mesmerizing, everything a film should be, but it took me about a week to get back any real sense of pride and delusions of self worth. I know most of us won't let our mind wander into this psychological no mans land. And it's easy enough to insist in the falsehood of my claims here. After all, aft thrives on some hidious truths, violence and death for example. Films without violence and death have a tough row to hoe. I just happen to believe my opinion has some weight here.
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Don't I look terrific, and don't you wish you were me, and doesen't it eat you alive that you can't be. .
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Critic's Pick: Reviewed by Janet Maslin





Type:
Features
Distributor:
USA Films
Starring Orson Bean, John Cusack, Catherine Keener, John Malkovich, Mary Kay Place, Cameron Diaz. Directed by Spike Jonze. (R, 112 minutes). Welcome to the fun house: in this exhilaratingly quirky first feature by Spike Jonze, a stellar video director, the reigning fears and obsessions of a technology-crazed, voyeuristic culture are given an even wilder workout than they got from "The Truman Show." John Cusack plays a discouraged puppeteer who accidentally finds a way into John Malkovich's mind. While the ordinary science-fiction plot might go downhill after revealing its gimmick, this one's inspired craziness goes on and on. Originality and cleverness abound. — Janet Maslin, The New York Time


Among the hits to emerge from this year's New York Film Festival -- like Pedro Almodovar's ''All About My Mother,'' Kimberley Peirce's ''Boys Don't Cry,'' Mike Leigh's ''Topsy-Turvy'' and Kevin Smith's ''Dogma'' -- none is more endearingly nutty than ''Being John Malkovich.'' None is more intriguingly prophetic, either. In this irresistible first feature by the stellar video director Spike Jonze, the reigning fears and obsessions of a technology-crazed, voyeuristic culture are given an even wilder workout than they got in ''The Truman Show.'' And the bizarre, masklike facade of today's lonely Everyman is again in the spotlight, even before Milos Forman's film about Andy Kaufman comes to town.








Mr. Jonze's film, with a terrific original screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, is not the first to explore the prospect of being able to sneak into the mind of another person. But Mr. Jonze's version is definitely the most fun. The innovative writer and director have come up with a contemporary fun-house ride that turns identity inside out and makes puppetry an all-important survival skill, which becomes a great boon to Craig Schwartz (John Cusack), the story's unwitting hero.

Craig, a puppeteer, is a shaggy-haired, dejected-looking fellow whose skill at pulling strings turns out to be much more valuable than he ever imagined.

Craig feels outclassed by the competition. (One of the film's many hilarious asides shows a rival staging ''The Belle of Amherst'' with a 60-foot Emily Dickinson.) And as he explains, ''Nobody's looking for a puppeteer in today's wintry economic climate.'' So he takes his skilled fingers out to apply for a filing job, and finds himself in a most peculiar place: on floor 7 1/2 of an office building, where both rents and ceilings are low. This is the headquarters for the Lester Corporation, where Craig makes two life-altering discoveries. One is an imperious beauty named Maxine (Catherine Keener), whose response to being told in a restaurant that Craig is a puppeteer is to ask immediately for the check. The other is a doorway that leads to a long tunnel, which ends somewhere in John Malkovich's brain. (Mr. Malkovich more or less plays himself, but the movie gives him Horatio as a middle name.)

Why Mr. Malkovich? Perhaps because he is an actor with an obvious gift for self-mockery, and because his ever-tricky presence fits perfectly into the film's string-pulling scheme. Just to begin with, it's funny to find Craig turning up inside the Malkovich mind to find the actor eating toast and reading The Wall Street Journal in his Park Avenue apartment. (The viewer need know nothing more about Mr. Malkovich's life except that this probably isn't it.) And Mr. Malkovich is well up to such tasks as playing a whole roomful of assorted Malkoviches and doing a ''Face/Off''-style Cusack imitation once Craig gets serious about invading the actor's privacy.

It's at about this revealing stage in the plotting that many a science fiction premise starts to fall apart. Not this one, however. Mr. Jonze's and Mr. Kaufman's inspired craziness leads into far greater complications as the film's other characters get in on the Malkovich game. While Ms. Keener, an established indie queen whose funny, alluring work here will make her much more widely appreciated, turns conniving Maxine into the object of everyone's affections, Cameron Diaz does a hilarious turn as Craig's frumpy wife, Lotte. Previously most thrilled by taking care of her pet chimpanzee, Lotte goes bananas over the gender-bending experience of inhabiting Malkovich's mind as he is seduced by Maxine. Soon she is making plans to discuss sexual reassignment surgery with her allergist and warning Craig, ''Don't stand in the way of my actualization as a man.''

Without spoiling what follows, let's just say that ''Being John Malkovich'' features a fine cast of dryly comic actors who are very much in on the joke. That can even be said of Charlie Sheen, who turns up for some wicked self-parody in a film that also features cameo appearances by Sean Penn, Brad Pitt and the New Jersey Turnpike.