We all have our secret fetishes locked within the recesses of our mind. With the modern day philosophies allowing such personal desires to be set free, we are now starting to realize how much of a universe sexual thought can diverge into. Perhaps feet are your forte? Or maybe black leather, whips, and chains set your loins ablaze? Or would you even prefer spending a late Friday night with a particularly nubile Billy goat? The ways in which arousing a person is possible are nearly all practiced today, but one of the pleasures shared across the world is fairly simple to understand: the fantasy of being someone else. All your personal flaws are non-existent and new traits are set in. You are a new person; it's time to explore. Being John Malkovich gets in-depth with this imaginative yearning and instructs us about the consequences therein.
Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) is your normal, average, ordinary guy. Yeah, sure, maybe on the weekends! He's a puppeteer, and he's hard up for work; puppets are just not the popular art they were...well, whenever puppets were cool. So Craig, married to wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz), owns a chimp, gets punched in the eye a lot, flips through the classifieds until he finds a real whopper of a job: Filer needed with nimble fingers, call Lestercorp! Puppets = nimble fingers, so nimble fingers = success! Craig enters the building, hopeful of finding a job he can keep steady - that is, until he finds that the floor number is 7 1/2. From then on, things keep getting stranger and stranger. The 7 1/2 floor is half as large as a normal one, so the doors, walls, ceilings, and furniture are smaller than usual. The secretary thinks Craig has a speech impediment when the head of Lestercorp, Dr. Lester, thinks he himself has one when they both speak perfectly. Craig finds himself falling in lust with his co-worker Maxine, whose name he instantly pops out on the first try. In such bizarre movies, you might be wondering what turning point causes the film to get even weirder. Well, here goes.
Dropping something behind his filing cabinet causes Craig to pull it from the wall. There, he finds a tiny door that a person could only crawl through - which he does. Eventually, inching down the slimy tunnel within becomes the least on his mind when he is sucked in like a vacuum and plopped right into the eyes of actor John Malkovich. It's nothing amazing; it's just Malkovich reading the paper and eating breakfast. After about fifteen minutes, Craig falls from the sky to land by the New Jersey turnpike. Making his way back home, Craig tells Maxine about the portal and they soon capitalize a business from it: 200 smackaroos for a peek through John Malkovich's point of view. However, it isn't long before Malkovich starts to realize that there's someone else beside him inside of his mind...
Are you confused yet? I don't blame you at all. Being John Malkovich is a mix of everything you've ever thought was impossible of understanding in life; it is in understanding's representative effigy. I seriously don't know what writer Charlie Kaufman was boiling his mind on when he made the script for the movie - speed, pot, coke, a Starbucks-brand vanilla frappachino - but whatever it was managed to get him to write one of the quirkiest and most zonked-out film I may have ever seen. Let's go over it.
Leaving the plot for last, we'll start with music. I'm pleased with the music, actually; there's a lack thereof, leaving the character's emotions and dialogue, situations, comedy, and atmosphere wide open, exposing the viewer to its exotic fumes. The camera angles are all right; Steadicam seems to be the thing these days, huh? The most varied angle would probably have to be the view through John Malkovich's head, and it's only a black border with a circle in the middle. Nothing spectacular there, but as I've said before, it's not the point. The actors are really great; standing out is John Cusack and Cameron Diaz. Under Craig's shoulder-length mane and Lotte's frizzy mop, I wouldn't have recognized them without investigating the movie further. John Malkovich, being the star attraction, must have had to really think about his role; that is, himself. Think about it: could you really act as yourself when the part was in a movie? I'm not even sure I could (editor's note: I could...).
We had to get to it sooner or later: the plot, the story, the structure, the big taco of the whole of cinema. Was it good? Yeah, it was. Being John Malkovich has the makings of a good film. The downfall? You probably guessed it already. This movie was just the craziest, most bizarre thing I've ever seen. Most people won't like this, I'll tell you what. It's like Magnolia on crack, and I didn't like Magnolia (the ending just left me saying, "What?")
Being John Malkovich isn't a good movie. It's not a bad movie. It's not a great movie. It's just...well, I think that's really up for you to decide. This isn't Monty Python weird; this is Sundance Film Festival/coffeehouse weird. I can't tell you if you'll like it or not, really. If you enjoy art films as such, I'm pretty sure you'll love it. But for the others, stand clear unless you're a real cinema lover. This is a portal best left closed for good. |
