paulmartin177 Review of Being John Malkovich

Being John Malkovich (1999)

Malkovich? Malkovich! MALKOVICH? MALKOVICH!

[8/10 · 18 May 2006]

This is a wonderful and truly strange film, and perhaps the strangest thing about it is that it got made at all given today's Hollywood film system. The story concerns an unhappily-married, unsuccessful puppeteer (played by John Cusack), who discovers a hole behind a filing cabinet in an office block which leads 'into' the (actual, real-life) American actor John Malkovich. Those who go down this hole are then transported into Malkovich's identity and/or brain (it's difficult to explain it exactly unless one has seen the film!) for a few minutes, and then dropped out onto a nearby highway! You'd think that this would be enough to guarantee a film of tremendous originality, but there is so much more weirdness and imagination in this film that one's interest is sustained throughout. For example, the floor of the office in which this hole is discovered was deliberately built for midgets, so that anybody of normal height has to bend over to avoid hitting their head on the ceiling! The reason for this is 'explained' to the puppeteer (who lands a filing job there) in a short film for new recruits, although we (and they) are none the wiser after seeing it. Eventually Malkovich himself ends up going down the hole, resulting in one of the most bizarre and disturbing (and funny) moments I have seen in a film. What he encounters is a world (or at least a restaurant) populated entirely by John Malkovichs: men, women, babies...! This could so easily have been a completely pretentious and confusing shambles of a film, but the director (the brilliant Spike Jonze) handles things with such focus and style that one is eased comfortably into the semi-fictional universe presented. I think what make the film work is that it manages to be both surreal and very ordinary at the same time: some of the lead characters are deliberately rather shabby and dull in their appearance (Cameron Diaz in particular), and the scenes in which we the audience see the point-of-view of whoever is inhabiting Malkovich are very mundane (and strangely touching, I found), such as washing up, ordering crockery over the phone or eating toast. The whole visual style of the film is very drab and slightly under-lit, which serves to emphasise the far more bizarre aspects of the actual story. Credit must also go to Charlie Kauffman, who wrote the screenplay. Wonderful stuff.