Potential is not enough to be considered innovative

Rating: 2/10 (2 December 1999)

I found _Being John Malkovich_ to be an over-hyped one joke comedy/drama/story. The film was logically inconsistent. The problem is not simply its poor logic, but that that failed to tell a good or interesting story. If this film exemplifies innovation, then Hollywood is in serious trouble. The film demonstrates that Hollywood is bereft of good story tellers. A more interesting story might have been exploring the question of would we return to a single mind if, in travelling into a new body we could bring along friends.? If many people can be in one body at a time and a host body can go into another host body, via the doorway, then an infinite or even several repetitions of this process will lead to a lot of people in one head. If the film had explored the cosmological possibilities that the original mind was God or simply a teenager in Burbank, California, then the story might have been of interest. Think of a reversed _Truman Show_. If the film had explored schizophrenia, then it might have been interesting. However, we would probably have been watching a poor take off on the television series _Herman's Head_. (It scares me that people think that _Being_ is an innovative film.) If the doorway into another person's head had been explored, in the way that Kubrick tried to study male-female relationships through the film _Eyes Wide Shut_, or evolution in _2001_then the film might have been interesting. Alas, Spike Jonz is no Kubrick. Perhaps it is too much to ask, but why not?
Another problem was character development. The character Maxine (Max), played by Catherine Keener (major babe), was under developed. A golden opportunity wasted. Instead we are treated to the archetypical lives of John Cusack (Craig) and Cameron Diaz (Lotte). We see little of Max's life. Max was the most interesting character because she represented an edgier and grittier character than the gormless nearly amorphous characters played by Cusack and Diaz. Their performances were mediocre in filling such formless characters. Cusack was better in _Say Anything_, as Lloyd Dobbler. Diaz, while playing against type, was undeveloped. She can act, but not in that role. I think she was poorly cast because she was cast against type. Julie Hagerty would have made an interesting Lotte.
The first puppet play, acts as an overture for the film and offers an intriguing start, but it goes downhill from there. If the story had explored the question of identity with any integrity or focus, it could have been great. The story could have explored what it is that makes us who we are. Who is John Malkovich?
Is there an original or are is he, are we, simply a collection of separate identities that emerge periodically? _Fight Club_, a shallow and pretentious film, explored this question with some effect. Unfortunately, _FC_ was a philosophically flawed film that never should have been made, but that is a subject for a different review.If _Being_ had been as gritty or as pseudo-honest as _FC_, we might have had a classic. Instead, we are treated to a few laughs and conned into believing that we have been included in a sophisticated tour de force.
The idea deserved a better script. The film's sexual sub-plot was distracting. The film tried to justify this by exploring the issue of sexual attraction. The problem is not in its content, but that it is so trite and really there for shock effect rather than to be meaningfully explored. Are screenwriters bereft of originality and ideas that they have to troll through Howard Stern programs?
Was the plot really that innovative and daring? The film was about as innovative and daring as the script and dialogue for _Star Wars_. (To its credit SW never claimed or was spoken of as innovative in this way). The story was simplistic, trite, and overplayed its few scenes of humor. The receptionist story line, like the 71/2 floor was funny the first time. After that, it dragged. I wonder if the screenwriter was inspired by Monty Python stories but lacked the daring to bring off a similar farce.
As for its main premise, that we, or anyone, would want to be John Malkovich, who cares? I have enough trouble and fun trying to find out who I am and why. Are other people's lives so boring or so well understood that they have the time or the desire to be someone else? If anything demonstrates the death of imagination, I suppose it would be this. The film's premise had potential which was its only saving grace. The film could have been great if it had explored voyeurism. I am not suggesting a crude expose like _Body Double_, or a more sophisticated understanding in _Sex, Lies, and Videotape_ or even the classic _Rear Window_ but one that could explore the soul of the entertainment industry.
The film could explore an industry where appearance masks a hidden reality. An industry that has changed and distorted popular culture through its insistence on emphasizing the surface, or the look, over its content or its meaning. One can understand why modern art like film rarely possess a complex thought. The result is that films and modern art simply pursue shock or the lowest common denominator: sex. If the film had explored the voyeuristic soul of popular culture instead of relying on the cheap and jejune titillation offered by the lesbian subplot, it might have been better. Think of _The Player_ crossed with _Being_.
In the end, the film sputters and stumbles along ending with at best a whimper. A perfect fin-de-siecle film with its near manic attempt to appear, fresh, innovative, and oh-so-fashionable but failing to mask the hidden desperation born of the realization that it possesses none of those qualities. Like the day after the Oscars, the film is a poor after image, a residue of the potentialities that it could have been.