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Spike Jonze creates a complex film unlike anything you've ever seen.
By STEVE PERSALL Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 5, 1999
The first question is: Why John Malkovich?
Does this master thespian know something the rest of us don't? There must be a good reason why the cosmos placed a portal into his brain large enough for someone to crawl through. People slide into his psyche like a temporal flume in Spike Jonze's outrageous debut film, Being John Malkovich. They sense what he senses at $200 a pop, finding something inside the actor that is missing from themselves. But, why?
Answers aren't easy after one viewing of Jonze's movie, which qualifies as one of the oddest screenworks ever committed to celluloid. Some moviegoers will insist Jonze should be committed, so psychotic is his vision and so relentless with its peculiarity. If he told this story on a city corner, pedestrians would cross the street in case insanity is contagious.
In a theater, Being John Malkovich is an audacious piece of fiction, one that will be loved or hated with equal passion and a narrow median. This dark comedy makes the movie mazes Fight Club and American Beauty almost seem elementary by comparison. The fact that three such brainteasers are playing in theaters at the same time is a positive sign that Hollywood studios can still be daring with their choices.
Being John Malkovich is essentially a puppet show, constantly questioning who pulls our emotional strings. That analogy is obvious in the hypnotic opening credits, when a marionette acts out a dance of despair mirroring the shaggy appearance and troubled soul of his master, Craig Schwartz (John Cusack). Craig has nimble fingers and a dead-end life, tolerating his frumpy wife's menagerie and a vastly uncommercial career choice. The world pulls his strings, and Craig is too melancholy to tug back.
Pressed into seeking employment, Craig settles on a job offered on floor 71/2 of the Lestercorp building. That's right: Floor 71/2, a four-foot level where employees stoop their way through daily doldrums. It's a terrific gag, worthy of a Monty Python skit. Yet, like every other riff in Being John Malkovich, the comedy is a subtle embellishment, not the entire punchline. Memories of Terry Gilliam's Brazil and its corporate mausoleums come to mind. Lestercorp's 105-year-old boss (Orson Bean, in a superbly addled performance) is a brash coot with a secret, surreal agenda.
Craig's slinky co-worker Maxine (Catherine Keener) is a puppeteer of another sort. Instead of strings, she uses sexy, aloof confidence to make men dance. Just what Craig needs to rejuvenate his id. His wife Lotte (a dowdy Cameron Diaz) is too preoccupied with her chimp's psychological trauma to notice the budding adulterer.
One day, Craig discovers a hidden door at Lestercorp and Being John Malkovich REALLY gets weird. He crawls inside and is sucked into the mind of Malkovich, or at least the version Charlie Kaufman created in his inventive screenplay. Malkovich munches toast, slurps coffee, checks his teeth in the mirror and Craig is right there behind the actor's eyeballs. But only for 15 minutes. Then he's dumped alongside the New Jersey Turnpike with a story that nobody in anybody's right mind would believe.
Maxine takes a turn and immediately sees dollar signs. Lotte becomes Malkovich one time and comes to the conclusion that she wants to be a man. The dynamics between these women take a neo-screwball twist comparable to Some Like It Hot for its gender-warping romance and bold sexual politics. Like everything else in Being John Malkovich, the less you know, the more you marvel.
And, what about Malkovich? He remains oblivious to the brain intrusion until Craig, Lotte and Maxine go too far with their neurotic ambitions. The movie takes an even edgier turn when he realizes what is happening, including a scene of self-indulgence unlike anything ever witnessed in a live-action film. Jonze is so casual with his eccentricities that such images confound, then delight, then linger for days.
The performances are uniformly fine, with Cusack excelling in the type of suppressed-hero roles he was built to play. Craig goes full circle from pathetic to menacing and back, and Cusack hits every beat with understated precision. Keener, an art-house favorite (Your Friends and Neighbors, Walking and Talking) just getting her due, is a glamorous sexual cipher, a perfect counterpoint to Diaz's portrait of a woman moving from dishwater to bubble baths. There is also a cagey cameo by Charlie Sheen that further blurs the line between truth and fiction.
Malkovich, of course, has the trickiest role, written by Kaufman in a way that hints nothing of what the actor is like in real life. Malkovich goes along with the joke, exaggerating that androgynous lilt in his voice and his psycho/sexual appeal. It's a brave self-parody, peaking with a scene in which Craig sneaks into his head and manipulates the actor into a reprise of that marionette's introductory dance. It's funny, disorienting and faintly sinister, which pretty much sums up Jonze's film.
Jonze, who appeared as a dimwit soldier in Three Kings, is a graduate of the MTV school of music video. However, Being John Malkovich displays much more patience than most alumni who preceded him. The plot is made especially odd because it plays so normal. Jonze allows scenes to expand to whatever dimensions his imagination will allow, an instinct that makes the running time at least 15 minutes too long, but always fascinating. The accent is always on ideas, and Kaufman's script has a vast supply. Two-hundred dollars would be a bargain to see what's going on inside their heads.