P4M MOVIE REVIEW: Being John Malkovich, by Spike Jonze
This is not a review. This is a warning. Skip this movie and you'll miss out on a turning point in the history of the American mind.
Spike Jonze's debut feature, Being John Malkovich, is the kind of sweet but poisonous meditation on the nature of existence that Woody Allen keeps trying to deliver but hasn't got the creative audacity to imagine. The premise is simple: loser-slash-puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusak) takes a shit job and finds, behind a lost door, a supernatural portal into the consciousness of actor-slash-cult figure John Malkovich. The portal allows fifteen-minute sessions in Malkovich's ongoing life, which Craig sells to people for $200 a shot, together with his business partner-slash-girlfiend Maxine (Catherine Keener). Meanwhile, Craig's wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) falls in love with Maxine when Lotte repeatedly visits Malkovich's body and Malkovich repeatedly fucks Maxine-- no more absurd, really, than those "trick" premises that begin Kafka's works, after which all proceeds with fucked-up normality.
Only this is not Modern European Literature 102. This is a commercial American movie that happens to be our era's most philosophically sophisticated look at incarnation: what it means to be ourselves. From the opening titles-- a preposterous but moving dream sequence of a puppet dance theater piece about existential discontent-- to the final credits-- in which poor Craig's curse of consciousness is mitigated by an unexpected form of baptism-- Being John Malkovich shows what happens when identity and desire are radically unhinged from the corporeal self and the blobby, bloody history of the body. Maybe a subject this big needed a director from the world of TV commercials and music videos (Bjork and Nike! The Pharcyde and Nissan! poetry and economy!) to make it fly.
Can a movie this modern succeed when basically nineteenth-century stories like The Sixth Sense are raking in millions? I'm telling you: Being John Malkovich is gonna do more than rake in dough. It's gonna help change the way we think.
Spike Jonze's debut feature, Being John Malkovich, is the kind of sweet but poisonous meditation on the nature of existence that Woody Allen keeps trying to deliver but hasn't got the creative audacity to imagine. The premise is simple: loser-slash-puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusak) takes a shit job and finds, behind a lost door, a supernatural portal into the consciousness of actor-slash-cult figure John Malkovich. The portal allows fifteen-minute sessions in Malkovich's ongoing life, which Craig sells to people for $200 a shot, together with his business partner-slash-girlfiend Maxine (Catherine Keener). Meanwhile, Craig's wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) falls in love with Maxine when Lotte repeatedly visits Malkovich's body and Malkovich repeatedly fucks Maxine-- no more absurd, really, than those "trick" premises that begin Kafka's works, after which all proceeds with fucked-up normality.
Only this is not Modern European Literature 102. This is a commercial American movie that happens to be our era's most philosophically sophisticated look at incarnation: what it means to be ourselves. From the opening titles-- a preposterous but moving dream sequence of a puppet dance theater piece about existential discontent-- to the final credits-- in which poor Craig's curse of consciousness is mitigated by an unexpected form of baptism-- Being John Malkovich shows what happens when identity and desire are radically unhinged from the corporeal self and the blobby, bloody history of the body. Maybe a subject this big needed a director from the world of TV commercials and music videos (Bjork and Nike! The Pharcyde and Nissan! poetry and economy!) to make it fly.
Can a movie this modern succeed when basically nineteenth-century stories like The Sixth Sense are raking in millions? I'm telling you: Being John Malkovich is gonna do more than rake in dough. It's gonna help change the way we think.
posted by Lucia Toledo at 9:44 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home