Being John Malkovich
"Being John Malkovich", with John Cusack, Catherine Keener, Cameron Diaz, Orson Bean, Mary Kay Place and John Malkovich. Written by Charlie Kaufman, directed by Spike Jonze. MPAA Rating R, run time 115 minutes.
As many of you know, my entire purpose in going to the moovies is to escape. Escape from life, reality, whatever. "Being John Malkovich" is a near-perfect escape vehicle - funny without frat-boy humor, serious without preaching and just inverted enough to make you forget everything else and just free fall for a couple of hours.
Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) is a struggling (duh!) puppeteer. His puppets (actually marionettes, if any one asks, and more specifically the amazing Phil Huber marionettes) are not Punch and Judy kid's show items, they're puppets that have issues, raise issues and people's hackles, as well. Craig's wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) works in a pet store, and keeps a menagerie of sick, wounded and disturbed animals around their grungy, smelly little apartment, including a therapy-for-life chimp with some serious abandonment issues. Lotte urges Craig to look for work, and as he scans the classifieds looking for a puppeteer job - you gotta love a guy that wears his denial like a silk dinner jacket - he comes across an ad seeking someone with fast and nimble fingers to do filing. Well, our boy knows an opportunity when it dope-slaps him, so he heads into town to apply for the job.
Craig's interview takes place in offices on the 7-1/2 floor of an ordinary office building - a "low overhead" officing solution. Everyone walks around bent over double, because the whole floor is stuck in between the seventh and eight floors, and is only five and half feet tall. The whole outfit is guarded by the auditory hallucination in residence, executive liaison Floris (Mary Kay Place) and run by the alleged Dr. Lester (Orson Bean). Craig gets the job, and starts to work nimbly filing, sorting, categorizing and classifying.
While all this is going on, he meets and instantly loses all semblance of dignity in falling over a woman named Maxine (Catherine Keener). Maxine is the single most straightforward person you'll ever run across. No subtlety, no chit-chat - just right to the point, and just what the hell are you looking at, buster?
Sooo, one day, while Craig files, he discovers an itty-bitty door behind one of the cabinets. On closer scrutiny, he finds a sort of tunnel - a "portal", as it were, and proceeds to crawl in. The next thing the poor boy knows, he's watching as John Malkovich eats his breakfast, and prepares to head out to the theater. The trick is, he's not watching from the outside, he watching from inside John Malkovich. He sees what John sees, he hears what John hears, all in the first person. Just as he's getting the hang of being inside John Malkovich's head, the portal spits him out, unceremoniously, next to the Jersey Turnpike.
Being the All-American opportunist, and hoping to get the undivided attention of the increasingly unobtainable Maxine, Craig tells her about the experience, and she and Craig go into the "Inside John Malkovich's Head Charter Tour" business, where, for two hundred a pop, you too can live inside John's head, and then - sploop! - get squirted right back on the Jersey Turnpike.
Meanwhile, back at the menagerie, Lotte, having tried out the Malkovich experience, decides that she is hopelessly in love with Maxine, (well hell, who isn't?) is probably a hopeless transsexual, and tries to use Malkovich to seduce Maxine.
However, Craig, not to be outdone, uses his innate talents as a puppeteer to control John Malkovich - kind of like that little gray guy inside the ambassodor's head in MIB - and can you guess what he's got in mind? You betcha. Nail Maxine.
This triple inverted capitalistic love trapezoid (with a half twist) just spins and spins, and were it anybody else's head besides John Malkovich's, it probably would just be too weird. Imagine "Being Adam Sandler". On second thought, don't. John Malkovich is the perfect vehicle for a charade like this - he's known as a "serious" actor, he's done foppish and creepy characters, and his private life really is pretty private. This cachet of the soft-spoken mysterious thespian allows director Spike Jonze to invent a Malkovich to suit the moovie, and the end result is a Malkovich with paying passengers inside his head.
There are some seriously twisted laughs in this one - my favorite is the restaurant scene - and there are some disturbing turns. The whole premise makes you wonder if maybe there might be someone inside YOUR head at any given moment. That would explain the voices, wouldn't it?
All in all, "Being John Malkovich" is a wonder of imagination and makes full use of its cinematic wacky license. Almost nothing is as it seems, except of course, John Malkovich. John Cusack is demented and driven, Cameron Diaz is demented, driven and victimized, Catherine Keener is just driven and John Malkovich is a tour bus. I loved it.
As far as I'm concerned, "Being John Malkovich" has four cows inside his head, but I sure don't want to be on the Jersey Turnpike when they come smokin' in for a landing!
As many of you know, my entire purpose in going to the moovies is to escape. Escape from life, reality, whatever. "Being John Malkovich" is a near-perfect escape vehicle - funny without frat-boy humor, serious without preaching and just inverted enough to make you forget everything else and just free fall for a couple of hours.
Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) is a struggling (duh!) puppeteer. His puppets (actually marionettes, if any one asks, and more specifically the amazing Phil Huber marionettes) are not Punch and Judy kid's show items, they're puppets that have issues, raise issues and people's hackles, as well. Craig's wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) works in a pet store, and keeps a menagerie of sick, wounded and disturbed animals around their grungy, smelly little apartment, including a therapy-for-life chimp with some serious abandonment issues. Lotte urges Craig to look for work, and as he scans the classifieds looking for a puppeteer job - you gotta love a guy that wears his denial like a silk dinner jacket - he comes across an ad seeking someone with fast and nimble fingers to do filing. Well, our boy knows an opportunity when it dope-slaps him, so he heads into town to apply for the job.
Craig's interview takes place in offices on the 7-1/2 floor of an ordinary office building - a "low overhead" officing solution. Everyone walks around bent over double, because the whole floor is stuck in between the seventh and eight floors, and is only five and half feet tall. The whole outfit is guarded by the auditory hallucination in residence, executive liaison Floris (Mary Kay Place) and run by the alleged Dr. Lester (Orson Bean). Craig gets the job, and starts to work nimbly filing, sorting, categorizing and classifying.
While all this is going on, he meets and instantly loses all semblance of dignity in falling over a woman named Maxine (Catherine Keener). Maxine is the single most straightforward person you'll ever run across. No subtlety, no chit-chat - just right to the point, and just what the hell are you looking at, buster?
Sooo, one day, while Craig files, he discovers an itty-bitty door behind one of the cabinets. On closer scrutiny, he finds a sort of tunnel - a "portal", as it were, and proceeds to crawl in. The next thing the poor boy knows, he's watching as John Malkovich eats his breakfast, and prepares to head out to the theater. The trick is, he's not watching from the outside, he watching from inside John Malkovich. He sees what John sees, he hears what John hears, all in the first person. Just as he's getting the hang of being inside John Malkovich's head, the portal spits him out, unceremoniously, next to the Jersey Turnpike.
Being the All-American opportunist, and hoping to get the undivided attention of the increasingly unobtainable Maxine, Craig tells her about the experience, and she and Craig go into the "Inside John Malkovich's Head Charter Tour" business, where, for two hundred a pop, you too can live inside John's head, and then - sploop! - get squirted right back on the Jersey Turnpike.
Meanwhile, back at the menagerie, Lotte, having tried out the Malkovich experience, decides that she is hopelessly in love with Maxine, (well hell, who isn't?) is probably a hopeless transsexual, and tries to use Malkovich to seduce Maxine.
However, Craig, not to be outdone, uses his innate talents as a puppeteer to control John Malkovich - kind of like that little gray guy inside the ambassodor's head in MIB - and can you guess what he's got in mind? You betcha. Nail Maxine.
This triple inverted capitalistic love trapezoid (with a half twist) just spins and spins, and were it anybody else's head besides John Malkovich's, it probably would just be too weird. Imagine "Being Adam Sandler". On second thought, don't. John Malkovich is the perfect vehicle for a charade like this - he's known as a "serious" actor, he's done foppish and creepy characters, and his private life really is pretty private. This cachet of the soft-spoken mysterious thespian allows director Spike Jonze to invent a Malkovich to suit the moovie, and the end result is a Malkovich with paying passengers inside his head.
There are some seriously twisted laughs in this one - my favorite is the restaurant scene - and there are some disturbing turns. The whole premise makes you wonder if maybe there might be someone inside YOUR head at any given moment. That would explain the voices, wouldn't it?
All in all, "Being John Malkovich" is a wonder of imagination and makes full use of its cinematic wacky license. Almost nothing is as it seems, except of course, John Malkovich. John Cusack is demented and driven, Cameron Diaz is demented, driven and victimized, Catherine Keener is just driven and John Malkovich is a tour bus. I loved it.
As far as I'm concerned, "Being John Malkovich" has four cows inside his head, but I sure don't want to be on the Jersey Turnpike when they come smokin' in for a landing!
