Film review: Being John Malkovich (1999)

Another one from the turn of the millennium, which you really notice when you see the large cellphones and (jarringly) a shot of the World Trade Center at one point.  I think this is the first screenplay that Charlie Kaufman got filmed, and just about all of them are philosophically interesting, so we might be watching another one very soon.  This is another one, like Memento, that everyone has to watch.  If you haven’t, why haven’t you?  Here’s one selling point: it’s laugh out loud funny, and nowadays, for me, just about nothing, is literally lol funny.  I had forgotten that, and actually a lot of details, as maybe you have if you saw it back then.  So here are the basics.  John Cusack (what happened to him?  Seriously?) is Craig Schwartz, a depressed, pathetic (the marker of which is his pony tail) puppeteer (okay, that’s a pretty big marker too) who longs to make money from his incredibly pretentious puppeteering.  This is not such a pipedream either, because he sees his rival Derek Mantini on TV doing a show involving a GIANT puppet of… Emily Dickinson (first lol moment).  But instead, he takes his puppet show about Abelard and Heloise to the streets to the outrage of a passing parent when its overt sexual themes come out.  His wife Lotte (played, astonishingly, by Cameron Diaz, in a complete departure from her usual “sexy free spirit” roles) who is a dowdy, frizzy-haired hippy type who loves animals to a pathological extreme (their house is overrun with them and she worries about getting the chimp psychoanalyzed), is sympathetic but wishes he would get an actual job.  Eventually he caves and, while finding nothing under “puppeteering” in the jobs section of the paper (another thing that dates the film), notices an odd advertisement for a “short statured” filer at an address that includes the floor number 7 ½ in an office building.  Getting in the lift he is puzzled to find that there is no button for that floor, but another passenger (who is now instantly recognizable as Octavia Spencer), noticing his puzzlement, guesses where he wants to go and shows him the method of getting there: you wait until the light in the 7 button goes out, but before the light in the 8 button goes on and you press the emergency stop button (causing a loud alarm to go off) and lever open the door with a crowbar that has been left for that purpose in the lift.  The resulting floor is about 4 ½ feet high, so everyone has to walk around doubled over.  (An explanation for the existence and height of the floor is given by an “orientation video” if you’re curious.)  We are soon introduced to Dr. Lester, who hires the impressively nimble-fingered Craig to do filing, and his secretary Floris, after whom the ancient Dr. Lester lusts, but who insists everyone has a speech defect (because she has a doctorate in “Speech Impedimentology” from Case Western) – she insists that Craig’s name is “Juarez”.  Craig soon settles in and is immediately smitten by Maxine, who works in another office on the floor and is plainly contemptuous of him.  She is interested however, when Craig discovers a portal (well, a muddy tunnel) behind a two-foot-tall door behind a filing cabinet in his office, which, when you crawl a ways into it, suddenly sucks you into the consciousness of… John Malkovich.  (The joke of the whole script is that John Malkovich was never a huge star, mostly a respected theater actor, when this was made, so it’s completely arbitrary that he should be the person named in the title.  But the mad genius Charlie Kaufman wrote the script that way and refused to change the name even when Hollywood came calling and demanding he pick a bigger star to get the film made (something Malkovich himself agreed would be better - he offered to direct if Kaufman would let, say, Tom Cruise be the actor).  So the script bounced around for awhile until a young director of pop videos and commercials, Spike Jonze, also became attached to it and they got Malkovich to do it.  Even the characters in the film don’t really know who he is – none of them can name an actual movie he’s been in.)  At first, you just get to experience things from Malkovich’s point of view (the first time Craig watches him eat toast, check his teeth in the mirror, walk out of his apartment building and into a taxi, where the driver first guesses his name is “Mapplethorpe,” then insists he’s seen him in “that jewel heist movie” – despite Malkovich’s insistence that he’s never been in any such film.  Then, after 15 minutes, you emerge (covered in mud) about 6 feet in the air above a ditch by the side of the New Jersey Turnpike (this is where we get a shot of the World Trade Center).  Craig immediately uses this experience to try to impress Maxine, and she decides to make money out of it by setting up a business open between midnight and 4 AM charging $200 a trip.  But actually the next person to try it is Lotte, who finds it a life-altering experience.  She so enjoys it that she decides it must mean she’s transsexual, which simply annoys Craig.  Everything gets more and more complicated: Maxine seduces Malkovich and has sex with him while Lotte is “in” him, and Lotte falls hard for Maxine.  But Maxine actually realizes because she can “see” somebody else behind Malkovich’s eyes, and so starts calling him Lotte while lovemaking, which both disturbs and arouses him.  Craig discovers this and becomes so enraged that he captures Lotte, forces her to tell Maxine she’s about to enter the portal so that Maxine goes to have a tryst with Malkovich, but then he enters the portal.  It turns out that Craig, being a puppeteer, discovers he can control Malkovich and soon trains himself to stay in Malkovich indefinitely.  He wins Maxine over and “Malkovich” switches careers to become a world-famous puppeteer.  Meanwhile Lotte discovers that “Dr. Lester” is actually the 19^th century builder of the office building who has been using the portal to switch bodies every 44 years and is not happy to learn that Craig has intercepted his next “vessel.”   Oh, and before Craig takes over, Malkovich himself goes down the portal into a nightmare world were everyone has his face, and the only word anyone can say is "Malkovich".

How are things resolved?  Well, let’s just say Craig’s fate is pretty pitiful, and perhaps worse even than he deserves. 

So what’s the message of this film?  Charlie Kaufman has a very negative view of existence in general, so I don’t think the message is simply “you should be yourself” or “don’t get caught up in the cult of celebrity” (because, of course, Malkovich is a pretty minor celebrity, and the film itself has some great celebrity cameos, from Charlie Sheen to Sean Penn), it might just be explicitly stated in a line that Craig delivers to the chimp early on in the film “You don’t know how lucky you are being a monkey, because consciousness is a terrible curse.”  And Craig himself discovers how much worse that curse can be without control over your life.

Should you watch it?  Of course you should – it’s a brilliant script, both hilarious and philosophical, quirkily adapted with John Malkovich gamely making himself look absolutely ridiculous.  Maybe watch Dangerous Liasons first to see why Malkovich is worth caring about in the first place.