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Being John Malkovich: Movies
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The premise of Being John Malkovich is easy to explain: one character finds a tunnel that leads to John Malkovich's brain. Simple to explain, but it is the variations on this premise that make the movie such a delight. You only get to spend 15 minutes in Malkovich's brain before you get dumped out beside the New Jersey turnpike. As fast as you can come up with questions about the premise, the movie answers them in twists too perfect to reveal here. What would happen if Malkovich himself went through the tunnel? What would happen if more than one more person went through?
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Being John Malkovich got to the question first--well, not first, of course, but first as far as the late-1999 movie season was concerned. The question: What would it be like to be someone else--and how do you get there? Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley was, and is, one of the most trenchant works to address this question, and director-screenwriter Anthony Minghella's film of that book is a strangely wondrous achievement. Far superior to Minghella's last, much-touted effort, The English Patient, Ripley doesn't flinch for a minute at the unsavory implications of the aforementioned question, and that makes this movie about discomfiting a "prestige film" as one could imagine.
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Being John Malkovich is no novelty act, no deliberately quirky one-off (you know, the sort of stuff a writer initiates after first discovering "Twin Peaks"). The film is dreamy comedy in the stylistic vain of Luis Buñuel, although it's not the anti-bourgeois tract as one might anticipate from a story about fringe New Yorkers desperate to inhabit a sophisticated movie star.
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Being John Malkovich is more than just the latest cool, smart, funny movie. It jumps off the screen with the kind of freshness, originality, and light-handed stranglehold on the Zeitgeist that moves movies forward.
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There's wacky poetic justice in the structure of "Being John Malkovich." Though most of its characters all want to be the same person, the movie itself forges a unique identity unlike anything else you've seen at the theater. It's a loopy original.
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A special vote of courage should go to John Malkovich himself. Not only is the movie version of Malkovich a shallow womanizer, but ... the entire concept of the film would be too much for most actors to even consider taking the part. Malkovich hams it up where appropriate (the dance of despair, for example), but he gives a very solid performance that becomes the hinge of the movie. Without such great acting from Malkovich, the film would have been unworkable. Because he gives such an intense and committed performance, Being John Malkovich becomes, rather than a mockery or a joke, a kind of tribute to the special genius of the man, John Horatio Malkovich. He's clearly in on the joke, and he knows how to play the various levels of artifice.
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