Delicatessan meets Monty Python

Rating: 9/10 (13 March 2003)

Being John Malkovich is one of the oddest, and most brilliantly original, comedies ever made. John Cusack, brilliant as the anti-hero, is a depressed puppeteer who takes a job as a filing clerk in a very strange office. The surreal detail, yet consistent atmospherics, of Cusack's life, are bleakly rendered in a sublimely low-key fashion. Then he discovers the strangest thing of all, a portal into the head of actor John Malkovich. The rest of the film is more silly than truly surreal, and the tone more farcical, but it never rests on its premise, instead developing ever more layers, and finally delivers an appropriately nightmarish finale.
In the vividness of its portrait of a grotesque world, the film resembles Delicatessan (and not just because of the monkey!). For sheer insane originality, it brings to mind Monty Python (the original sketch shows, not the over-rated movies which lack the coherence and depth of Jonze's effort). In terms of plot, it resembles nothing. Full marks to Malkovich for staring in the film for which he surely now will ever after be known by.