Being John Malkovich [2000]
Being John Malkovich [2000]
While too many films suffer the fate of creative bankruptcy, Being John Malkovich is a refreshing study in contrast, so bracingly original that you’ll want to send director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman a thank-you note for restoring your faith in the enchantment of film. Even if it ultimately serves little purpose beyond the thrill of comedic invention, this demented romance is gloriously entertaining, spilling over with ideas that tickle the brain and even touch the heart. That’s to be expected in a movie that dares to ponder the existential dilemma of a forlorn puppeteer (John Cusack) who discovers a metaphysical portal into the brain of actor John Malkovich.
The puppeteer takes a job working as a file clerk on the seventh-and-a-half floor of a Manhattan office building; this idea alone might serve as the comedic basis for an entire film, but Jonze and Kaufman are just getting started. Add a devious co-worker (Catherine Keener), Cusack’s dowdy wife (a barely recognisable Cameron Diaz), and a business scheme to capitalise on the thrill of being John Malkovich, and you’ve got a movie that just gets crazier as it plays by its own outrageous rules. Malkovich himself is the film’s pi?ce de r?sistance, playing on his own persona with obvious delight and–when he enters his own brain via the portal–appearing with multiple versions of himself in a tour-de-force use of digital trickery. Does it add up to much? Not really. But for 112 liberating minutes, Being John Malkovich is a wild place to visit. –Jeff Shannon
Customer Review: Slightly too gross to be perfect
The film is deeply funny because of the grossness of the concrete realization of the argument of the plot. It is muddy, dirty, crawling in a corridor, perverting in the most grotesque way Alice in Wonderland looking through the looking glass and sharing an apartment with an ill-mouthed parrot and a chimpanzee. The hole in the hedge is a rat hole in the wall and the only attractive thing in it is the glass doorknob. Then the plot is absolutely funny. It is based on one person being able to crawl inside another person and impose his or her personality onto that other person. That’s strange but very fast it becomes ah ah because of the identity of the person inside and the identity of the person with whom the inhabited one is having relationships, discussions, rapports, even intercourse of course. In a way it is perverted since a woman can live her love for another woman by accepting her to be in the man that is the vessel of that intruder or invader. If the man is invaded by a woman and has a personal relationship with another woman, the two women are making love, to the point of procreating a girl, their daughter. That’s definitely ah ah. Then the film deals with phantasms in the heads of Western men and women. Everyone wants to be able to make their desires and emotions towards anyone whatsoever real. But after all you have to keep some appearances, as a British TV series about a certain Mrs Bouquet used to say, and that’s how the inhabited human vessel can enable so many possible connections to take place. Then it shows that success in our society does not depend on the value you have but on the value the public persona you are living in has. If you live in the body of a great person anything you will do will be successful and seen at once as great. Finally, and that’s the punch scene at the end of the film, this possibility to transit from one person to another will enable some old people to get into younger bodies and live forever. The very fundamental myth of the Western world, but a myth they have never dared to realize in a religious belief or philosophical theory. The Buddhist did it but not the Christians, nor the Moslems, nor the Jews, the three Semitic religions. So Hollywood is playing the role of the provider of eternity to the few who will believe it because they have always dreamed of it. Blessed be the gullible, … So all in all a funny film that makes you feel at times kind of ill at ease.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Customer Review: A slight film with a novel idea and some good characters, but no real aim
There are very few stars this idea would have worked well with, and I think they chose the right one. He is a compelling character in his own right, and I did like the scenes inside his head. So, they got half way there and just sort of thought ‘Well that’s enough, we’ll fill the rest of the film with charming oddness and arty abstract visuals.’ In a way it was almost impossible that this film was going to go anywhere conventional after it had set out its store with its trendy, arty premise. Really not badly done at all, but I’m not sure you’d call it so much ’strikingly original’ as more a patchwork of inspirations from other films and filmakers.
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