If surrealist Salvador Dali had been a filmmaker instead of a painter, Being John Malkovich might not have been such a pleasant surprise. After all, Dali was gaining his fame fifty years ago. I guess we would have been "Finding Peter Lorre" instead.
Andre Breton, father of surrealism, talked about "psychic automatism", a state one arrived at after liberating the brain from the control of reason. Here, one is free to explore the "real process of thought." Viewing Being John Malkovich is like entering a state of psychic automatism for 112 minutes. The film's extreme weirdness is guaranteed to divide the audience between those who relish the thought of being released from the boundaries of a logical, Newtonian world, and those who dread it.
"I think. I feel. I suffer." In mock-Descartesian tone, so pronounces Craig Schwartz, an under-employed angst-ridden puppeteer ("nobody's looking for a puppeteer in today's wintry economic climate") whose life is about to take a most unexpected turn for the weird when he applies for a job as a file clerk. In a scene of Monty Python-esque grotesquery, the job turns out to be on the 7 1/2 floor of the Mertin-Flemmer Building, a world with 4-foot ceilings, a receptionist who confuses everything Craig says ("Mr. Juarez?" "No, I'm Schwartz." "Warts? I don't understand a thing you're saying.") and a boss (Orson Bean) who is a 105-year-old sex maniac. The weirdness grows exponentially when Craig finds a door hidden behind a file cabinet that turns out to be a portal into John Malkovich's consciousness.
Craig and Maxine (a co-worker he lusts after) decide to sell 15-minute trips into Malkovich's mind for $200. After spending a lifetime as yourself, they reason, who wouldn't want the chance to be someone else – someone (sort of) famous – for fifteen minutes? The inspired mayhem of this film is that this is merely the film's premise.
The performers play it wonderfully straight (especially effective are the sad-eyed Cusack and the electric Catherine Keener) which simply magnifies the film's otherworldliness. Watching John Malkovich play himself as if possessed by others is a particularly perverse pleasure.
This is a film about identity, self-worth, voyeurism, consciousness, commercialism, celebrity, power (who is the ultimate puppet master?) narcissism, mortality and the most demented menage-a-trois in recent memory. This strange place is populated not only by damaged humans, but neurotic animals (chimpanzee psychotherapy?) as well. The film sports some decidedly intriguing and bizarre moments, including a perfectly realised solipsism: when John Malkovich enters his own portal he finds a world that "no person should ever have to endure."
Perhaps the ultimate clue to the film's purpose resides in its opening moments, when Craig stages a puppet show of the 12th century love affair between Heloise and Abelard. Peter Abelard was a theologian whose philosophical musings included the belief that one must try to see all sides of any issue before coming to any conclusions.
You know, see the world from another's perspective for, say, 15 minutes or so?
