Deconstructing John
Being John Malkovich
On general release. Director: Spike Jonze.Starring John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener
John Malkovich is an unusual Hollywood actor. Not because he's 'really' a stage player, nor because he's cast as the baddie when British actors don't return their calls. Not even because his talents are debatable. ("Is that acting, or just being a little weird?") He seems to work all the time, but isn't quite A-list. And he's bald as an egg and doesn't care who knows it, despite looking resplendently vulpine in a shoulder length wig in Dangerous Liaisons .
His greatest oddity may be the ability to laugh at himself in a way that a more pampered actor would be incapable of. Above all, he has just the right alchemy of notoriety and obscurity to draw the art house set.
The posters for Being John Malkovich show a crowd holding up masks of his face. He doesn't appear for the first third of the film, leaving you feeling that you may be in the wrong cinema. Still, what you get in that first third is more than enough to keep you from complaining to the management. John Cusack is a puppeteer waiting for recognition to come pounding on his door, who lives with his wife (Cameron Diaz) and her menagerie, and would rather hide in his bed than face the living room, let alone the world. And no wonder, the city streets are mean to busking puppeteers, and his opportunities are limited.
Spike Jonze' direction, Charlie Kaufman's script, and Cusack's misfit twitching gel beautifully. Their New York is as skewed and hostile as the town in Eraserhead. Diaz, who seems to have a thing about hair, is still radiant under a radioactive Geena Davis barnet. Perhaps the film slides when Malkovich comes on, plot and wackiness at once proving too much.
Some may carp at the stretched logic of the scenario. Malkovich-ness is reached through a door with obvious Alice in Wonderland overtones, and world behind it is just as dreamlike.
Being John Malkovich lines up philosophical questions, and resolves none. Well, if film makers could resolve the great imponderables, what would philosophers do? That's a question I'm not going to answer. Kaufman seems to have taken years of pub and dinner table arguments - the kind so drunken that you can't remember what you decided at the end of them and strung them all together. The result cruises through a discussion of celebrity - Malkovich is universally recognised, but for roles he didn't play, toys with questions of fidelity - it's too implausible to explain on the page, but there's non-explicit sex, with one partner explicitly thinking of someone else, and tickles questions of identity. No one ever asks why being John Malkovich might be good - he doesn't have an exciting life on this evidence - or whether men have more fun than women.
Perhaps we all experience the world totally differently, in ways that go beyond looking in the mirror and seeing not your own clichéd features, but those of a squinting, bald fortysomething. The best evidence of this is that Stanley Kubrick can show coruscating images, but with a cold eye, to which the nuclear death of the world or Nicole Kidman are just exercises in light. Jonze, from this piece, especially the closing credits, scans the world with a more humane heart. Don't listen to anyone who tells you that the attention span of video directors lasts as long as the flavour of chewing gum. Jonze can go the distance, and if this is the future, let the good times roll.
