imaginative, innovative film

Rating: Null/10 (3 June 2000)

`Being John Malkovich' certainly ranks among the most brilliantly conceived and executed films of the past several years. Overflowing with imagination and creativity, it manages to breathe new life into that trickiest of cinematic genres  the surrealist satire. Like all films that dare to take risks, `Being John Malkovich' sometimes stumbles in the paths it chooses to take, but at least its course is always an innovative and fascinating one.

John Cusack stars as Craig Schwartz, a soft-spoken nebbish leading a life less of quiet desperation than of overwhelming blandness. Unable to support himself as a puppeteer, he finally succumbs to his wife's pressure to seek out a job, landing a position as file clerk in a bizarre company located on the 7 ½ th floor of a Manhattan office building. One of the triumphs of the film is that it portrays the surreal in such an understated and quiet way. This floor has ceilings so low that the people who work on it must continually crouch as they move about their business, yet they all accept that fact with an uncomplaining and unquestioning good humor. Even when Schwartz discovers a strange portal hidden behind some cabinets leading directly into John Malkovich's brain, all those to whom Craig reveals his secret take very little convincing both to believe him and to experiment with it themselves. Thus, by creating a world that already appears slightly askew in its reality  Craig's wife, in addition, runs a pet shop and therefore fills their house with a menagerie of exotic animals the film makes it possible for us to go along with the characters' otherwise inexplicably blasé reactions.
Writer Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze hit upon a number of fascinating themes in the course of their bizarre musings. Craig, for instance, learns that there exists a certain safety in the tediousness of everyday life, for the moment he allows the extraordinary to enter his ordered world he unleashes passions - that have been long dormant both in himself and his wife - which he finds himself unable to control. His wife, in particular, whom he has mistakenly pigeonholed as a woman concerned only with the humdrum domesticities associated with married life, provides him with a rude awakening as she begins to surpass him in her burgeoning obsession with experiencing the excitements of sexual liberation. Craig also discovers the terrifying truth about himself, that, beneath the façade of a meek, mild-mannered artist there lurks the soul of a repressed despot, as he comes more and more to relish the ability to move into Malkovich's mind and control his thoughts and actions  much as with his beloved puppets, but now on a much more grand, much more malevolent scale. The film generates much of its comic tension through the complex sexual interplay that develops among Craig, his wife, Lotte, and his alluring but enigmatic co-worker, Maxine, in whom both husband and wife develop a more than passing sexual interest. With tinges of `No Exit,' the three characters find themselves caught in a frustrating world of overlapping and therefore clashing sexual desires and passions.
The film demonstrates a real stroke of genius in its casting. John Cusack, with his look of understated bewilderment, perfectly conveys the soul of a man too long accustomed to expecting little in the way of surprise out of life. Catherine Keener brilliantly captures the detached cynicism and taunting coolness that makes her such an enthralling sexual temptation to both Craig and Lotte. And whose audacious decision was it to cast Cameron Diaz as the near-dowdy second fiddle to Kenner, to make her the NON-sex object in the film? As for Mr. Malkovich himself, he seems to be having the self-deprecating time of his life as he allows himself and even his lack of general public name recognition to become targets for gentle ribbing.

`Being John Malkovich' is not a perfect movie. It occasionally sags in places and suffers from some repetition and, like many utterly original and audacious works, it sometimes alienates its audience through its quality of often-cold calculation. At moments in which the iconoclasm seems to become an end in itself, one may be tempted to see the film in emperor's-new-clothes terms, wondering if what one is seeing is really as brilliant as it appears or just an intellectual scam being played on a self-congratulatory elite audience. For the most part, however, `Being John Malkovich' is fertile enough in its invention and varied enough in its imaginativeness to rate as a film well worth seeing and cherishing. There should definitely be more like it!