Being John Malkovich (1999)

Director: Spike Jonze                                     Writer: Charlie Kaufman
Film Score: Carter Burwell                              Cinematography: Lance Acord
Starring: John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener and John Malkovich

I’m sure that when Being John Malkovich was first released people responded with peals of laughter and praise for its hilarity. I can see the humor in the situation, but I think surreal humor just isn’t that interesting to me. Because in the end, once you remove John Malkovich from the whole thing, it’s just another sex comedy, and not a very interesting one at that. I guess that’s the real tipping point for me. I’m not a fan of either Cusack or Diaz, and only marginally of Keener and Malkovich, and so there’s nothing to really keep my interest.

The premise is fairly simple, that on the 7 1/2 floor of a Manhattan office building is a portal that puts people inside the brain of John Malkovich. For fifteen minutes they get to experience what Malkovich experiences before they are ejected out onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. But if you really stop to think about it, there’s no actual script in that. The humor comes from the incongruity of the situation, not from anything the characters say. In fact, I would even argue that you don’t even get John Malkovich. What we experience of him is simply the experience of any generic celebrity, and that’s it. My expectation before watching the film was that I would see things that were specific to Malkovich’s life, but of course that doesn’t happen.

So, what are we left with? The puppeteer played by John Cusack is so incredibly pathetic that there’s little to associate with or cheer for. Diaz is just as bad as his wife, mother to both a monkey and Cusack, and not much difference between the two. When he locks Diaz in the cage with the chimp toward the end of the film, he has unconsciously symbolized his life with her. Both of them wind up lusting after Catherine Keener, who is the best actor in the bunch, but even her character lacks anything remotely sympathetic. Given all of that, who is the protagonist? Obviously it’s supposed to be Cusack, but in the end it must be Malkovich himself. And that’s another problem, because Malkovich isn’t even Malkovich. As stated above, he could be anybody.

There was only one place where I actually laughed out loud, and that’s the scene where Malkovich enters the portal to himself. He lands in a restaurant where everyone around him, men, women and children, are all versions of himself, and the only word anyone can say is, “Malkovich.” In the end, however, that’s not enough to carry an entire film. I wanted to like the film, but there was just too little to hang on to, and too much to dislike, especially the actors. The ultimate irony is that the most likable character in the entire film is Charley Sheen, in a beautiful cameo. It’s too bad, because I would have thought it would be impossible to make Being John Malkovich boring . . . but unfortunately it is.