Movie: Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)
In these supposedly enlightened times nobody has yet made a mainstream screwball comedy about a husband and wife cheating on each other with the same person. In some respects, that would probably be truer to the spirit of Frasier than the current reboot, but until someone reactivates the writers room of "The Ski Lodge", we'll have to make do with Being John Malkovich. When Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) discovers the portal to the actor's head, he notes that this opens up all kinds of philosophical questions, about the nature of self and the existence of souls. "Am I me? Is Malkovich Malkovich?" Craig, Maxine (Catherine Keener) and Lotte (Cameron Diaz) quickly lose interest in those questions, instead exploring how they can use Malkovich to live out their absurd (mostly sexual) fantasies. I have liked everything I've seen from Charlie Kaufman, but I do find it a bit unfortunate that he has become more self-consciously intellectual since Being John Malkovich. His latter movies are not only more serious-minded explorations of the workings of the mind, but also strain a bit to be seen as such, even if I do find Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind his best work.
The witty, intelligent inventiveness of Being John Malkovich stands out in part because it doesn't overplay its weirdness. Floor 7 1/2 is in every way recognisable as an ordinary corporate floor; its denizens dress in standard business-casual and perform their tasks with a professional demeanor. It's just that everyone has to walk around with their head cocked because the ceilings have been lowered. The introduction explaining the history of the floor is funny and absurd, but also works as a satire of business culture. It's essentially a propaganda video that sugarcoats cost-cutting measures disregarding wokers' safety with cutesy quirkyness, highlighting how special one must feel to work in this environment. And even when the real fun starts, with Craig discovering the portal, that is depicted without too much fuss and with minimal special effects. You crawl through a muddy hole in the wall until you are suddenly sucked in and end up looking at the world through the eyes of John Malkovich. After 15 minutes you leave the man by falling out of the sky near the New Jersey Turnpike. It does get more complicated if it's Malkovich himself going through the portal or if someone is trying to be John Malkovich when another person is already in the actor. The former leads to the most (justifiably, not-to-be-spoiled under any circumstance) famous scene of the film, and the latter to a fantastically surreal chase sequence through Malkovich's unconscious that plays like a dry run for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
While the film goes to some cynical and dark places, and has a final scene worthy of a great Polanski horror movie, I also find it immensly charming and likable. Much of that is on John Malkovich, who plays 'himself' without any hint of vanity and is ridiculosly good in callibrating his performance based on who's in him. His interpretative dance aside, he does this with a lot of subtlety, grounding the film in its own reality and providing a sort of baseline for how nuts it can get without flying of the rails. It's strange that he didn't get an Oscar nomination for it. Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman deserved theirs, but this was their first feature and their giddiness in making it is so palpable it's easy to imagine them losing control over it with more unhinged performances/characters (everything involving Orson Bean is the weakest part of the film). That slightly juvenile giddiness also works in the film's favor though. All of Kaufman's films invite themselves to be seen as (at least somewhat) auto-biographical and Craig is his dumbest, least flattering alter ego. Most Kaufman characters face existential dread because they are sensitive souls too aware of the world's vast irrationality and unknowability. Craig's issues are more basic and more internal. When puppetteering he is too clever for his own good, and in the rest of his life he is a control freak too horny for his own good. If he was slightly more self-aware, he might have been able to make a film (or at least a puppet show!) like Being John Malkovich.
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