"... this is a very odd thing. It's supernatural, for lack of a better word."

Rating: 8/10 (28 May 2008)

When we talk about bad movies, we often say that they are so because they are weird, strange or because they don't make any sense at all. But "Being John Malkovich" is just too much weird and too much complicated to be rated as a bad movie.
John Cusack stars as Craig Schwartz, a struggling puppeteer who lives with a dog, a talking parrot, a chimpanzee and an almost unrecognizable Cameron Diaz as his wife.
Craig badly needs money, so he takes a job as a filing clerk and he works for a New York firm located on the seventh-and-a-half floor of a Manhattan building.
Things just get even stranger when Craig discovers a secret tiny doorway that leads him directly into the mind of actor John Malkovich (played by John Malkovich). After having lived a quarter of hour into Malkovich's head, Craig is ejected from it and mysteriously finds himself on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike, just outside New York City.
Craig and his new colleague Maxine (Catherine Keener) have the idea of making people who want to live the same experience pay for it. So, Craig and Maxine "rent" Malkovich's mind fifteen minutes at a time and people become a famous Hollywood actor for that amount of time.
"Being John Malkovich" is directed by Spike Jonze, better known for his numerous music videos, and masterfully written by Charlie Kaufman. His screenplay is brilliant and of an almost unreached level of originality and perfectly allies surrealism and the philosophy of mind.
Jonze evidently does a great job in the director's chair, with some astonishing and breathtaking moments. Unfortunately for him, Kaufman is the real star of this movie and so is his simply unreal and completely crazy story. At some moments, we could find ourselves wondering what does Kaufman have in his mind, if he didn't simply put his brain on autopilot and went on a wave of automatic writing.
Only a few examples are enough to illustrate my point of view. First of all, we get to know that Craig's wife works in a pet store, but is it a good reason to keep a dog, a talking parrot and a chimpanzee named Elijah in their apartment? And then, we get to wonder how can people work on the seventh-and-a-half floor of a building. And when we finally get the "rational" explanation, we wonder why we asked that question instead of shutting up.
And the characters we get to meet are not any more normal. The first example is the secretary who interprets every word wrong. Then, Craig's new boss, Dr. Lester, who is 105-year-old and who drinks almost exclusively carrot juice, which explains why he "pisses orange".
But except the surrealist moments, the movie is also one of the most thought-provoking and philosophical motion pictures of the recent years. Actually, 1999 seems to be the year of philosophy in Hollywood with the releases of "John Malkovich", "The Matrix" and "Fight Club".
The film cleverly plays with the themes of identity, celebrity and the body/soul union. Is living for a moment as a famous person is worth it? Is it legitimate? And if it was really possible, would there be a real danger of "playing" with a person like the characters of the movie do? "Being John Malkovich" is an intellectual comedy drama unlike any other. And the first term is the most important of the three. With such a mix of surrealism and philosophy, it's definitely not a movie for the weak minds. You have to love these two things and complicated stories as well, or else you're gonna quit on this movie about halfway through.
And the most controversial aspect of the film is the relationship between Maxine and Cameron Diaz as long as the events pass. There are moments that are gonna put some people away, if they are not instantly outraged and/or scandalized.
With everything I've said about the movie, there's only one adequate way to describe it : it's a movie that takes chances. And this attitude gets rewarded by the viewers' admiration and amazement.
I perfectly understand that it's not everybody who's gonna love "Being John Malkovich". But I believe that it's a movie that deserves to be watched. Not necessarily loved, but watched for sure. Because we have to salute the originality, the eccentricity and the vision of every artist involved into this project.
"Being John Malkovich" is one of the rare proofs that we can both stimulate our mind and our moralities by watching Hollywood actors. And this fact is enough for us to appreciate the movie as a whole.