By Spike Jonze, 1999.
Starring Orson Bean, John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, John Malkovich, Mary Kay Place.
Rating: 10/10, 10/10.
Certain movies are so good that, when you haven’t seen them in a while, you doubt your memories of them. Sure, it was a great movie, maybe one of the best of recent years, but was it really one of the best you’ve ever seen, one of the best of all time? It couldn’t have been.
Being John Malkovich is one of those movies for me. I saw it when it came out, back in 1999 (you remember, it was the year we were all partying), and it was like a revelation: this, I thought, is surely one of the best movies ever made. In the four years since then, though, I began to doubt that assessment. Surely I must have built it up in my mind. Surely if I watched it again, I’d realize that while, yes, it was still a very, very good movie, it was not nearly as great as I had made it out to myself to be. Besides, in 1999 I was just starting to break away from mainstream moviegoing. I hadn’t actually seen very many truly great movies then. Surely I’d seen enough great movies since then that Being John Malkovich would pale, at least a little, in comparison.
That was actually my reason for watching it again. I was curious to see how it stood up to my memory of it. Surprisingly enough, as you can see from the double tens in the rating column, not only did it stand up to the memory, it damn well surpassed it. It was better than I remembered. In fact, one of the very best movies I have ever seen.
It’s just relentlessly creative. The basic premise, as you probably know, is that, behind a filing cabinet in an office building, there’s a doorway that is actually some sort of metaphysical portrait into John Malkovich’s mind. You can be in his brain for fifteen minutes, after which you are dumped, in a sight gag that never gets old, no matter how many times it happens, on the side of the New Jersey turnpike, just over the state line. But that’s just the start of the insane creativity.
That gateway? Yeah, it’s on the seven and a halfth floor of the office building. To get to it, you have to ride the elevator until it’s halfway between the seventh and eighth floors, press emergency stop, and pry the door open with the crowbar that rests in the corner. All the action that happens on this floor happens with people hunched over, because the ceiling is so low, and with the emergency stop alarm ringing in the background every once in a while. The phoney explanation for why the seven and a halfth floor exists is one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen, too.
And then there’s the characters. Craig (Cusack), the depressed, struggling artist—whose art is puppeteering (and whose arch-nemesis puts on an acclaimed show called "The Belle of Amherst"—featuring a forty-foot tall puppet of Emily Dickinson). His wife, Lotte (Diaz, looking very frumpy here), and her compulsive need to take care of sick animals. The very, very dirty mouthed ("And I’m not banging her, if that’s what you’re implying") Dr. Lester (Bean). His secretary (though the use of that word is what makes him say that line I just quoted) Floris (Place), who is a speech therapist and thinks everyone has a speech impediment. And above all, Francine (Keener, who came out of nowhere and rocked my world with this movie, and then, as far as I can tell, went back to nowhere, more’s the pity), sarcastic, hilarious, vastly intelligent, extraordinarily beautiful, manipulative, wonderful Francine, who does the impossible, looking calm and collected on the seven and a halfth floor.
I want to go on forever about Being John Malkovich, I really do. It deserves going on forever about like few movies do. But there’s too much to say. I don’t want to say some things and neglect other things. A movie this wildly creative and wildly wonderful should be seen rather than read about. Seen repeatedly. Seen every day, if possible. But seen.