# Being John Malkovich (1999)

### reviewed by
Gary Jones

    Being John Malkovitch (9/10)

In Being John Malkovitch, the world is a very strange place. We start to realise just how strange when struggling puppeteer Craig (John Cusack) takes a job as a filing clerk on the seven-and-a-halfth floor of a New York office building. Now that's pretty weird. He has an equally peculiar home life, sharing his cramped apartment with his wife Lotte (a remarkably frumpy Cameron Diaz) and half the sick roster from the Bronx Zoo. That's also pretty weird.

But the Alice in Wonderland factor really kicks into overdrive when Craig discovers a slippery gloopy portal from his office into the head of actor John Malkovitch. Now that's really weird. Being in need of cash to support his puppeteering, he teams up with his smoulderingly sexy and self-assured co-worker Maxine (Catherine Keener) to exploit this metaphysical rollercoaster ride, and they start selling trips into Malkovitch's head. Craig is keen to point out the serious philosophical questions that the Malkovitch portal raises, such as issues about the nature of self, but everyone, including the audience, is having too much of a wild time to care. When a truly bizarre and hilarious sexual triangle develops, things get very complicated for Craig and his concerns shift from the metaphysical to the personal.

In a wonderfully self-parodying and self-effacing role, Malkovitch portrays himself as a vain and pompous thesp, and his success as a film actor is called into question when some characters haven't even heard of him, and nobody can name any films he's been in. The other performances, including some surprise guest appearances all as self-mocking as Malkovitch's, add to the fun.

Director Spike Jonze and writer Charlie Kaufman have concocted an indie comedy that's wildly original and wildly funny, but it has its dark side, particularly in Craig's later treatment of Lotte, but never fear - justice is seen to be done in the end. Like the travellers into Malkovitch up there on the screen, we're sucked into a fabulous experience and spat out, exhilarated, at the other end. It all could so easily have fallen flat after the initial joke wore off, but the quality of the ideas and the performances sustain interest right to the end, although as is usually the case with plots based on gimmicky ideas, the ending can't quite tidy up the story as neatly as we'd like, but that's being waaayyy too picky. If David Cronenberg and Franz Kafka had got together to make a screwball comedy, they could hardly have come up with anything better than this very weird and very wonderful gem.

-- Gary Jones Homepage: www.bohr.demon.co.uk PGP public key available from servers (DH/DSS key ID: 0x11EAE903)

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