Being John Malkovich: theatre of the absurd for film.
Movie Review: Being John Malkovich, directed by Spike Jonze.
I honestly can’t believe I’ve never seen this before. It’s in the same class of ridiculous quirkiness, brilliant acting and directing, and super-sharp dialogue as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Stranger than Fiction, and (to a somewhat lesser extent) I Heart Huckabees, but in many ways succeeds on a far greater scale than any of those films.
Malkovich stars John Cusack, Catherine Keener, and a completely unrecognizable Cameron Diaz as a complicated, twisted love-triangle that happen to stumble upon and become obsessed, each in their own respective ways, with a portal that allows anyone who crawls through it to see the world through the eyes of renowned actor and performer John Malkovich, played by the very same and very brilliant John Malkovich.
First, let me just say how risky it must have been for Charlie Kaufman (more recently of Eternal Sunshine and Synecdoche, New York fame) to write this film. Being John Malkovich was the first full-length feature film Kaufman ever wrote. Before that, he had written for a string of not-so-successful TV shows including The Dana Carvey Show and The Edge. But besides the fact that this was his first film, Kaufman wrote a script that must have been near-impossible to produce. Say, for instance, that John Malkovich didn’t like it, or didn’t want to do the film. The entire project would have been dumped instantly, just because of one actor’s unwillingness to perform.
And in many ways, Kaufman’s incredibly lucky that he got the people he did. Few directors would have been as capable for this project as Spike Jonze, and all three leads seem to fall into their roles as if they were tailor-fit for them. But the star of the show is, appropriately, the one and only John Malkovich. Little can be said about Malkovich that hasn’t already been said. He’s one of the few actors who do the opposite of what most actors try to do. He doesn’t become characters, he turns the characters into himself. That may sound cheezy, but Malkovich always does it perfectly. And in this film, he just continues doing what he’s always done, which is play himself. If nothing else, it’s painfully obvious that no one could play Malkovich quite like Malkovich.
Being John Malkovich is a near-perfect film, brought down only slightly by my own inability to fully accept just how weird it can sometimes get. Malkovich will only appeal to a very limited audience, probably one that is open to suspending disbelief to an extreme and doesn’t mind watching something that on-stage would be classified only as theatre of the absurd. In many ways, writer Charlie Kaufman has become the Eugene Ionesco of film, and that is in no way, shape, or form a bad thing. Quite the contrary.
Final Grade: A very, very solid A, or 95%.
