Being John Malkovich Review
by "Stephen Graham Jones" (stephen AT cinemuck DOT com)November 22nd, 1999
Being John Malkovich: alice in hollywood
The test of a fantastic story is whether or not you can interpret it in such a way that all the 'fantastic' stuff comes out as projected material--some character's internal world being presented as external. Think Fisher King. To look at it another way, if you strip off all the fantastic elements, there should still be a story there we can somehow relate to, make sense of, etc. All of which comes down to the big question: are the fantastic elements really necessary? Could Fisher King have been presented in any other way and still have been as effective? Unlikely. The same goes for Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich, a movie which casually asks us to accept that there might be 'corridors' you can stumble upon which allow temporary access into another person's mind.
And, in our hero Craig Schwarz' (John Cusack) case, not just any mind, but one with a face we all know: John Malkovich (John Malkovich). Craig discovers this corridor when he hires on as file clerk for a company stationed on the mythical 7½th floor of a major office building, a floor which logically shouldn't exist, which is our cue that there's going to be some serious make-believe going on here. Before Craig even gets to the 7½th floor, though, we already know that: can a struggling puppeteer whose wife takes the family chimp to psychotherapy even have an ordinary adventure? Of course not. So when we see him crouching his way down the diminutive halls of his new workplace, dodging the 105-year old lecherous boss (Orson Bean), exchanging banter with the speech-impeded secretary, it's hardly a surprise. Or, the surprise is that Being John Malkovich is going further than most comedies, isn't settling for the traditional quirky character in a sane world (Don Quixote) or vice-versa (Brazil), but is instead creating characters who are quirky because that's the only sane response to a fundamentally quirky world.
It's about survival, which, for Craig, is immediately identified with romancing cold-shouldered co-worker Maxine (Catherine Keener), which is another thing Being John Malkovich casually asks us to accept, or rather, doesn't really bother to explain. But so be it. She is beautiful, and 'other,' and without pets, so maybe that's all a comedy needs in the way of justification. After all, this is a movie where a chimpanzee has a flashback with English subtitles; compared to this, any honest character motivations would appear minor. And in comedy the focus is always on end results, anyway, not causes. Causes don't make us laugh; results do. They're the punchlines. And Being John Malkovich has enough to go around, from selling tickets to John Malkovich's head ($200 for 15 min. of fame) to the highly inventive love triangle that Craig and Maxine and Lotte (Craig's wife, a brunette Cameron Diaz) find themselves in, with the body of John Malkovich in there somewhere too, unwittingly at first, unwillingly as things progress.
In the midst of all this, too--at the core of the movie--Craig's getting to live out every puppeteer's primal fantasy: to be inside the skin of someone else, which of course is inconsiderate enough that it eventualy has to backfire, give him an opportunity to learn, occasionally despair, etc. But it's an entertaining ride while it lasts--Faust with the headlights off. And does it all work if we take this 'corridor' to function as Craig's projection? Yes. One way of looking at it is simply as the story of two people drifting inexorably apart, only one of them is actively trying to slow things down with a (Schehezeradean) story that eventually spools out of his control, leaving him stranded first on the New Jersey turnpike, next somewhere even more unexpected. Another way of looking at is as the most inventive movie in a long while, one of the few that can string together an extended series of wholly implausible What Ifs into a marginally coherent narrative.
And if that's not enough, Being John Malkovich also has the bar-none best cameo ever: Charlie Sheen as Charlie Sheen, talking about lesbian witches and how the truth is for suckers, a tall drink in his hand the whole time, a telling smirk on his face that simply won't go away. The only other movie this year that can possibly compare with Being John Malkovich would have to be American Beauty, but that's all the way in the suburbs, leaving Being John Malkovich in a class of its own. There's simply nothing else quite like it. It's like finding your own little corridor which opens onto a whole new world of movie-making, where the rules of mainstream don't hold. Stay as long as you can.
(c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones, http://www.cinemuck.com
More on 'Being John Malkovich'...
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
