Best year ever: Being John Malkovich
Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s first collaboration is still prickly and wonderfully weird.
It’s nearly impossible to believe that Being John Malkovich is the first feature for director Spike Jonze and writer Charlie Kaufman. It’s too assured and confident, folding in and out of reality and tackling themes of existence and identity without feeling like a philosophy lecture.
Perhaps being newbies emboldened the duo, who push boundaries and fearlessly spin this existential experiment. Being John Malkovich feels ahead of its time; heck, 25 years later, it still feels ahead of our time. It’s a strange and at times abrasive movie, constantly tossing out twists, turns and hypotheses. Jonze and Kaufman set the bar extremely high with this collaboration, and it’s a testament to their talent that they’ve repeatedly jumped over it throughout their careers.
The story seems to be based on a calling card script that accidentally got made into a real movie. John Cusack’s Craig is a puppeteer who creates elaborate marionette routines; committed to art above all, he doesn’t seem to consider that if you’re performing free puppet shows on the street, maybe you should tone down the sex. When his wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz) – who works at a pet store and brings home stray animals, including a chimpanzee suffering from depression – urges him to get a real job, Craig finds himself on the 7 ½ floor of a high-rise (during orientation, he learns the floor was created as a gift to the architect’s short-statured mistress). It’s there he meets Maxine (Catherine Keener), with whom he’s instantly smitten; while Maxine doesn’t return the infatuation, she seems perfectly fine leading him on and seeing what happens. And what happens is that Craig finds a hidden portal that allows people to enter the brain of actor John Malkovich (himself). Craig’s amazed by the philosophical ramifications, Maxine immediately seeks to capitalize on it, and Lotte finds her entire sexual and gender identities thrown into disarray.
Being John Malkovich is a very weird movie, and not an easy one to like. It bounced right off me when I first saw it, and neither Jonze nor Kaufman seem too worried about whether audiences enjoy their time with these characters. Craig is not just a capital-A Artist; he’s a capital-A Asshole. He’s pretentious and self-centered, which, this being a Kaufman character, is really a mask for his self-loathing. He’s only met Maxine once before he tries to sleep with her. But Maxine’s also a self-centered, manipulative narcissist, amused by her power to twist Craig around her fingers; late in the film, she marvels about his ability to control Malkovich while she controls him. The only decent person is Lotte, who’s subject to the whims of Maxine and Craig’s schemes, and spends much of the film in a cage so that Craig can enter Malkovich’s brain and sleep with Maxine – who thinks that Lotte is the one behind the eyes.
I’ve met many people who outright hate this film, and I get it. None of the characters are likable, and the film’s aesthetic is grungy and dour. I wrestle with whether I actually enjoy the film or just really respect the artistry on display, but I lean toward the latter because the film’s so endlessly inventive and funny. Kaufman and Jonze understand that these characters are despicable, and there’s bravery in following them through all of their destructive choices, trusting the audience will stay onboard.
Kaufman’s one of our great pessimists. His screenplays often feel like the works of a cynical philosophy grad student, bending in and out of time and reality, often taking place not in any real world but in the vast, dank mazes of our minds. He’s fascinated by human consciousness and the components that make us human – but there’s the sense that he’s repulsed by what he finds. He’s only burrowed more into these ideas since he began directing his own scripts, and while I think Synecdoche, New York; Anomalisa and I’m Thinking of Ending Things are bitterly funny masterpieces about death, depression and self-loathing, there’s a reason why many recoil from his works.
Kaufman’s existential fantasies go down a bit easier when he has a collaborator who can cut through the acid. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – possibly the best of any of the films to come from a Kaufman screenplay – works so well because the writer’s dourness constantly wrestles with director Michel Gondry’s playful whimsy and hand-crafted approach to filmmaking. And Being John Malkovich transcends its cynical view of humanity because of director Spike Jonze, who would go on to create the masterpieces Where the Wild Things Are and Her.
Jonze got his start in music videos and working with skateboarding crews; he was one of the creative voices behind the Jackass franchise. Where some directors would try to rein in the weirdness and inaccessible nature of Kaufman’s script, Jonze seems energized by the opportunity to follow this film’s weird rabbit trails and strange jokes. The film revels in absurdity even before anyone mentions Malkovich’s name; there’s probably an entire film that could take place at Craig’s workplace, particularly between the business’ owner and the hard-of-hearing secretary who’s somehow convinced everyone else to believe they have a speech impediment. The low ceilings of the 7 ½ floor bring added weirdness to the visuals, and by creating a world that feels just left of real, we’re able to accept the weird metaphysical journey on which the movie takes us.
The movie bursts with ideas about identity, celebrity and meaning. Many of the people who fork over cash to enter Malkovich’s brain are seeking an escape from humdrum lives – one man chokes back tears as he says he’s eager to experience life as a non-overweight person (although he concedes Malkovich would be his second choice). Craig is initially fascinated by what the existence of a Malkovich portal says about the existence of a soul and what it means to be human; but it’s not too long before the frustrated artist is instead using the vessel to have sex with Maxine and leveraging the actor’s celebrity to have his art noticed for the first time. For Lotte, portrayed by Diaz at her dowdiest, being seen as Malkovich allows her to feel desired for the first time, and she leaves questioning whether she truly belongs in a man’s body and with her eyes opened to a sexuality she hadn’t considered before. Lotte’s decision to declare she’s transexual on a whim – she later just says she’s a lesbian – feels a bit tone deaf years later, but the film’s exploration of sexual identity and gender fluidity feels years ahead of its time (alongside The Matrix, released just a few months earlier, questions of identity were in the air in 1999).
We often use the maxim “walk a mile in another’s shoes” assuming that it will teach people to be more empathetic. But for the characters in Being John Malkovich, experiencing life behind his brain – for 15 minutes before being spit out on the New Jersey Turnpike – their time in the portal just makes them more scheming, manipulative and narcissistic. Craig ultimately gets to become the ultimate puppeteer and take over Malkovich’s life to the point where he quits acting to become a full-time marionette artist. Lotte discovers that the portal’s origins trace back to a group of eccentrics who want to live forever through Malkovich’s body. Maxine is the only character who doesn’t enter Malkovich’s mind – and yet she’s the one most eager to encourage other people to take that step and see how it can advance her interests. Nearly every character is willing to control or subjugate others to further their own desires and schemes. Kaufman’s script heavily implies that while we can be open to wonder, our ultimate path is to take the mysteries of life and bend them to our impulses and wants. It’s a cynical take on humanity, but I don’t know that it’s an incorrect one.
Again, it can be too acidic a slog for many, and it’s fascinating that none of the cast tries to sweeten it up. Cusack, in particular, leans into Craig’s slimiest impulses. He’s a prick and Cusack hilariously depicts that in all his self-obsessed, pretentious greasy glory. Keener, in one of her first lead roles, has a blast portraying Maxine as seductive and amused by her power over everyone who’s infatuated by her. I don’t know that Diaz has ever been better as the film’s one innocent person. And I honestly can’t believe Malkovich wasn’t nominated for an Oscar for his work here; the actor is game for lampooning himself as a self-serious artist who’s not above using his celebrity to its advantages when propositioned by Maxine as a young fan. And the scene in which the actor goes through the portal and finds himself bouncing throughout his psyche is hilarious, but also notable for just how many different takes on his own name Malkovich delivers.
Revisiting the films of 1999 has been a blast, and there’s more to come. But I find myself amazed revisiting just how formally inventive and thematically daring so many of these films were, and how unafraid films like Being John Malkovich, Election and American Beauty were to place extremely unlikable characters at the forefront1. These might not all be enjoyable films and some may have aged poorly, but it’s amazing seeing what was going through our minds at the turn of the century.
Other looks at films from 1999
Fight Club also belongs on that list. I was going to revisit that one and write about it last month, but time didn’t allow and I think the world is okay without yet another essay about Fight Club (a movie that I do like quite a bit, though).
Great review. One of my all time favorites.