19) Being John Malkovich

Being John Malkovich (1999)

Director: Spike Jonze

Starring: John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, Orson Bean,
Charlie Sheen, John Malkovich


As I mentioned in my blog on Three Kings, I'm reading Geoff King's book Indiewood, USA. At the moment I'm in the middle of a chapter about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Having just trawled my way through a section on Adaptation (a film I am yet to see), I thought I'd make my life easier by sitting down to watch Being John Malkovich so I'll know what he's talking about when I tackle that section.

Unemployed puppeteer Craig (Cusack), begrudgingly takes a filing job in a strange, low ceilinged office on the 7 1/2th floor of a Manhattan office building. Despite being married, to Lotte (Diaz), Craig falls for a woman he meets at his new workplace, Maxine (Keener), though she shows no interest in him. One day Craig stumbles across a hidden portal which enables people to enter the mind of John Malkovich for 15mins. You see what he sees, hear what he hears, feel what he feels. He enters a partnership with Maxine to make money off it, selling it as an experience. When Maxine starts having an affair with Lotte, but only when she's inside Malkovich, Craig sees an opportunity to be with Maxine.

Charlie Kaufman is probably the most unique and interesting screenwriter working in the American cinema. As well as Being John Malkovich he is the mind behind other intriguing films like Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. His screenplays are usually quite unconventional, not necessarily adhering to mainstream narrative conventions, and often dealing with interesting, mind-bending scenarios. He works with similarly non-mainstream directors like Michel Gondry and, in this case, MTV prodigy Spike Jonze. This means he's not for everyone. Some people really love his stuff, some people just don't get it. Because he is unconventional he tends to work on the fringes of Hollywood, in that 'Indiewood' are of overlap between the independent sectors and the major studios. Studios aren't going to back him with big budget projects because his 'alternativeness' means his films are no sure thing to make that money back, but they are happy to support his projects providing the budgets are reasonable and he is still able to attract some big names to his films (Jim Carrey, Meryl Streep, Nicholas Cage, Kate Winslett, Cameron Diaz to name a few).

How Kaufman settled on Malkovich as the central figure I don't know. Apparently Malkovich was initially reluctant to star in the film but was worn down by Kaufman and Jonze over a couple of years. As much as I don't really like him (there's just always been something about him which has rubbed me the wrong way) he does a great job in what must have been a very challenging role. Can you imagine what it must be like not only having to act a character who in theory is supposed to be you, but is in fact written by someone else, but to have to act a character who is supposed to be you being controlled by other people?

People tend to credit the phenomenon of glamorous actresses uglifying in the name of art to Charlize Theron and her Oscar winning performance in Monster, however Cameron Diaz pipped her by four years with her performance as Lotte Schwartz. But what was so striking about her performance in this film was not just that she wasn't glammed up and sparkling, it was the way that Jonze chose to treat her. Despite being only the second character to appear in the film, there are no close ups on her face in the first 40mins at least of the film. She features quite prominently in the introductory stages of the film but is always shown either in the background of a shot of John Cusack's character, or in shadow, or not front on, or in long shots (likely to indicate how low a priority she is in Craig's life). In fact if you didn't already know that it was Cameron Diaz playing the part it would take you quite a while to work it out. The camera does not treat her as a star.

Just as an aside, I love when you look at movies from a few years ago that have tried to predict the future and you can see by just how far they missed. I know we're screwing up the environment but the odds of the world looking like Blade Runner by 2019 are lengthening by the day. Being John Malkovich doesn't make any grand sweeping claims but I did get a bit of a giggle out of the 'Seven Years Later' (which keep in mind would have been 2006) which featured Charlie Sheen playing himself as a bald man with one of the world's great comb-overs.

Being John Malkovich has a strange premise, but is not difficult to follow. It prompts some interesting questions and, in an awareness that it is doing so, acts some of them out (at one point John Malkovich goes through the portal into the mind of John Malkovich). It's a wonderfully surreal film, at times very funny, but with moments of sadness.