Review of Being John Malkovich

Introduction

Spike Jonze’s sublimely inventive post-modern junk-farce (from a brilliant script by Charlie Kaufman) is the kind of metaphysical conundrum comedy that doesn’t begin to make sense, but getting to that place of mind-boggling pretzel logic is more than worth the ride thanks to Jonze’s mind-bending, virtuoso take on surrealism.

Video

Anamorphic 1.85. Pretty good, but a bit flaky at times, particularly during dark scenes where there appears to be more than a little flaring (tried it on two players: Samsung 709 and Proline DVD-1000, same problem on both)

Audio

Dolby 5.1. So good you feel you’re inside John Malkovich’s head. Nice.

Features

Weird, wonderful and predictably redundant. ‘Being John Malkovich’s deceptively large number of extras display an arbitrary irreverence that is truly dumbfounding. Firstly, there’s a page with nothing on it which is…a page with, uh, absolutely nothing on it. Funny, but its inclusion on the DVD defies comprehension. From the movie, we get the fullscreen presentations of the 7 ½ floor orientation film and the hilarious John Malkovich puppeteering TV documentary. There’s an Intimate Guide to the Art of Puppeteering, and to counter that almost genuine slice of added value is an Intimate Guide on the Art of Background Driving… nuff said. Spike’s photo album is a collection of the director’s production snap, they turn out to be more revealing than the Interview with the hirsute director, who squirms his way through five minutes of an interview before stopping his car to vomit on the street. Hysterical, and mind-f***ing. Its not all bizzaro weirdness, there’s a return to (relative) normality with a standard collection of trailers and TV spots plus some filmographies and talent files.

Conclusion

Down on his luck puppeteer Craig Schwartz finds a hidden portal into the mind of John Malkovich on the 7 ½ floor of his new office building, and finds that life inside the mind of the renowned actor is far more enjoyable than life with shaggy, animal-loving wife Cameron Diaz. However, things take a turn towards the genuinely beguiling when bristly co-worker Maxine (Catherine Keener) decides to sell rides into the portal for two hundred dollars a trip. However, when Malkovich gets wind of the scheme the house of cards starts to crumble. Along the way we get transsexual fantasies, lesbian paradoxes, mixed metaphors, a world full of Malkovich’s and more star-cameos than you can shake a stick at.

As Schwartz, John Cusack is oddly miscast and loses control of his slacker charm long before we’ve even begun to invest any sympathy in him, Keener and Diaz are much better in strong female roles, particularly Keener, whose zesty bare-to-the-bone Maxine is post-feminism with fangs. Best of all however is Malkovich himself, confounding expectations and performing to perfection the many tortured dimensions of his own personality while at the same time taking time to remove plenty of p***: “Shut up you overrated sack of s***!”. In way, ‘Being John Malkovich’ is befuddled by its own winsome originality, but its definitely a very new kind of movie, with all the fickle superficiality, and aesthetic self-indulgence which that implies.