It’s at this point in the already bizarre “Being John Malkovich” that we really go down the rabbit hole. Behind a filing cabinet at work Craig discovers a door that leads to a tunnel that leads … inside John Malkovich’s brain. For 15 glorious minutes, Craig experiences the thrill of being someone he is not–and for once knowing exactly who he is. At the end of 15 minutes, he is dumped out on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. Quick to see the possibilities, Maxine turns this magical portal into a business: for $200 a pop, anyone can briefly be John Malkovich.
Working from a teemingly imaginative screenplay by newcomer Charlie Kaufman, ex-music-video director Spike Jonze has made a deliciously one-of-a-kind surrealist farce. The smartest decision Jonze makes is to underplay everything. Instead of trying to match the script’s lunacy with an equally flamboyant style Jonze goes for a rough-hewn almost-realism.
Kaufman’s tale keeps spinning with ever more baroque twists. We watch with a mounting sense of glee: where next? Well, for one thing, Maxine meets and seduces the famous actor in his apartment, which sends Craig rushing to get back inside Malkovich so he can be the one who’s actually making love to her. But what happens when Craig’s wife, Lotte, gains possession of Malkovich–and the romantic sparks start to fly between her and Maxine? And when Malkovich himself–after discovering that he has become a kind of public thrill ride–gets sucked down the tunnel into his own brain?
Kaufman and Jonze are riffing on all sorts of notions about identity and celebrity and sexual displacement. “Being John Malkovich” plays Ping-Pong with our heads, but the beauty of it is how lightly it tosses its ideas around. It aims to please, not lecture. Malkovich himself must have sensed the film’s essentially benign spirit when he sportingly agreed to play this fictitious, and none too flattering, version of “himself.” “Shall we to the boudoir?” the “real” J.M. leers to Maxine with that epicene affectlessness that has made him one of the most enigmatic and unlikely of movie stars. This may be the role he was born to play, and he plays it brilliantly. Keener is smashing as the cynical and sensual Maxine, Bean is dottily inspired and Cusack captures the mopey self-importance of the puppeteer with perfect pitch. I don’t know how a movie this original got made today, but thank God for wonderful aberrations.
