Being John Malkovich

The intricately funny Being John Malkovich, a funhouse-mirror fable of perception and experience, works on our senses more effectively than any movie in years. When our protagonist, hangdog puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusack), and his dishevelled, animal-loving wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) are talking in their kitchen, it feels like an authentic cramped kitchen in a low-rent apartment — you can almost smell the lingering odor of cheap spaghetti sauce, the smothering essence of animal fur (the Schwartzes own a dog, a chimp, and a parrot). At the hunchbacked offices where Craig works as a file clerk — on the 7 1/2th floor, where the ceilings are about five feet high — you feel the 9-to-5 oppressiveness physically literalized. It’s the inverse of those fantastic high ceilings in Brazil, which made the worker drones seem small; here, the offices reduce the actual stature of the workers, and you imagine the neckaches and backaches you’d suffer after an eight-hour day.

This is the world set up for us by writer Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze, both making their feature debuts (Jonze had directed many MTV videos and appeared as the cheerful redneck soldier in Three Kings). The movie proper begins in Craig’s “workshop” — a tiny space where he makes and practices with his puppets — and the whole movie is a workshop. Throughout, we’re made conscious of the fact that we’re watching a puppet show, with actors saying lines, and yet we’re drawn into their suffering and triumphs, as we are when we glimpse Craig’s puppetry. (An indication of the filmmakers’ generosity of spirit: Craig is presented as fairly self-absorbed and faintly pompous, but his work itself is quite accomplished.) Kaufman and Jonze push artifice far but not too far: The weirdness is always rooted in drab reality, the outsize emotional shifts always defined by plausible motives. The filmmakers are sly enough to know why we go to movies — to be someone else, passively, vicariously, feel what they feel — and the movie itself proceeds from that premise.

And perhaps the largest irony in a movie full of them is that probably no moviegoer in history has ever sought to feel what John Malkovich feels — the cold sardonic hipster, the mystery man, the moral blank who keeps you at arm’s length and laughs at you for watching him. Malkovich makes it impossible for us to enjoy him except at a considerable distance. So of course he’s the perfect marionette for this mad puppet show. Behind a heavy file cabinet at work, Craig discovers a portal into the head, the consciousness, of John Malkovich. The square hole suggests a TV screen or movie screen; the portal is long and, well, womblike. Craig crawls through the wet and muddy portal and is violently sucked into Malkovich’s everyday experiences for 15 minutes, after which he is just as violently deposited — from the sky — onto the ground outside the New Jersey Turnpike. (The Malkovich ride removes you mentally and then physically.) After a while, Maxine (Catherine Keener), an icy co-worker with whom Craig is smitten, proposes that she and Craig start JM Inc. — charging people $200 for 15 minutes inside Malkovich. He becomes a “vessel” — an escape pod from the mundanity of life. Never mind that most of his experiences, when experienced by JM Inc.’s clientele, are just as mundane.

In recent years, I’d grown a bit impatient with Malkovich’s imperiously noncommittal performances. He seemed to use the same fey, dead voice in every role; what was new and refreshing in The Killing Fields and Empire of the Sun had grown familiar by the time of Con Air and Portrait of a Lady, where Malkovich was merely using his cerebral creepiness to cash easy checks playing bored, jaded villains. I’d just about counted him out as an interesting actor when he surprised me with his playful turn as Teddy KGB, the gambler with an accent as thick as a brick, in Rounders. Perhaps Malkovich had been bored in all those films, and his boredom showed — perhaps he needs more freaky parts like Teddy KGB and, well, John Malkovich. His performance here thoroughly humanizes him, opens him up to us and to himself, especially when he’s occupied by other people and we get to see his spasms, his balking at a controlling puppetmaster consciousness, and finally his complete subjugation to someone else’s personality. His childlike grin late in the movie when he announces to an unimpressed audience, “I’m John Malkovich,” makes up for all the cool one-handed performances he gave throughout the ’90s.

Being John Malkovich will benefit greatly from repeat viewings and fervent post-viewing deconstruction. Kaufman’s screenplay, chaotic and messy at first glance, is actually drum-tight in its themes and metaphors. It’s right on the cutting edge of gender discussion, as seen in a lovemaking sequence that is perhaps the oddest (and the funniest and most touching) menage a trois ever put on film. Is Malkovich the only vessel? Can any of us, like him, be vessels without knowing it? To some extent, we all are; certainly all creative people are both vessels and puppeteers. The movie is about — among approximately 79 other things — the creative exchange. When telling a story, we inhabit the characters and see through their eyes, but they also inhabit us; and those who are told the story also project themselves into the characters and absorb them into themselves at the same time. BJM triggers complex connections and then skips lightly to the next thing; a movie that’s outwardly “thoughtful” could never be this thought-provoking. Like the Malkovich ride itself, it’s a fast and fun trip; only afterward do you appreciate where it took you.

Some will say BJM goes on a bit past its natural conclusion. Kaufman throws structure to the wind; an hour and a half into the movie, he isn’t shy about jumping ahead seven years or seven months. Our internal clocks tell us the movie should be wrapping up, tying up its loose ends; instead it expands and gets more tangled. I like that; the movie works overtime, it plays its loony self out right to the finish and beyond, when most movies would be grabbing a smoke and heading for the climactic shootout or tearful confrontation scene. (The climax of this movie, by the way, has both. And much more.) Craig’s quirky boss, the 105-year-old Dr. Lester (Orson Bean in an irrepressible comic turn), is nearly forgotten and then emerges in the third act as a major player, acting as journeyman and metaphorical conscience for the embattled Craig. Transgenderism is explored, toyed with and cast aside — it’s just another way of escaping an old self. BJM takes on a cosmic and rather serious tone in the second half while losing little of its satirical bite. Our senses are no longer engaged; it’s a mind trip now. Craig begins to recede, wondering to himself, “What have I become? My wife is in a cage with a chimp.” The inner and outer universes are on a collision course, and there is much talk about “ripe vessels” and eternal life. Women grapple in the primal mud and rain outside the New Jersey Turnpike. The movie finishes with a series of dazzlingly evocative yet simple images that express both freedom and confinement, progression and submersion.

Being John Malkovich is a triumph for Spike Jonze, who has distinguished himself as a rock-video artist mainly by not dealing in the same tired flash-flash, Cuisinart gimmickry we associate with MTV (and many of its graduates, like Alex Proyas). His contribution here, it could be said, is to display little or no style at all; he serves Charlie Kaufman’s ideas, knowing they’re freaky enough without cinematic embellishment. A young director who knows how to stay out of the way of a fine script is, perhaps, more valuable — and more durable in the long run — than a young director who sees a script as a series of hey-look-Ma-I’m-a-director whizbang angles and smash-cuts. Yet there’s a deadpan fizz of surrealism around everything he does here. We’re seeing through the eyes of a filmmaker with an amiably skewed take on things, along with a compassion that grants each character his or her own awkward dignity and flaws. And he’s working with a script that allows him access to emotional complications and absurdities that no conventional movie could touch. Being John Malkovich reminds us why movies like this need to be made; at its best, it reminds us that the medium hasn’t lost its magic yet. There are still new stories to tell, new portals to explore, new vessels to inhabit.

Modern Vampires

A fitfully entertaining nouveau-exploitation film written by Matthew Bright (Freeway) and directed by Richard Elfman (brother of Danny, who here contributes theme music). Casper Van Dien is Dallas, a fun-loving vampire who pals around with continental vamps Ulrike (Kim Cattrall), Panthea (the enthralling Natalya Andreychenko), Richard (Craig Ferguson), and Vincent (Udo frickin’ Kier!). He meets and falls for young trailer-trash vamp Nico (frequently topless Natasha Gregson Wagner) and takes her side against the powerful Count (Robert Pastorelli, better as a big-cheese vampire than you’d think) while eluding Dr. Van Helsing (Rod Steiger, so hammy you could serve him for Easter dinner).

The movie sort of farts around until the halfway mark, when Van Helsing hilariously gains a team of rowdy, pot-smoking Crips and Natasha Lyonne drops in for a small role as a lesbian who takes a liking to Nico. Good for a rental, but don’t expect too much more than your $4 worth; given the writer, director, and cast (Van Dien is better here than I’ve seen him before — something about playing a scruffy anti-hero vamp loosens him up), it should be a lot spicier and stranger than it is … although the scene wherein Van Helsing’s posse stages a gang-bang on a bat-monster version of Kim Cattrall has to go down in some sort of movie history. I guess the movie is content to be cheerfully cheesy junk, so don’t expect it to be otherwise. The DVD is full-frame and not a terribly good transfer.

Fight Club

In Fight Club, the self-consciously “daring” adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s excellent cult novel, men assemble and pound one another in dank basements; they spit blood and teeth and then return for more next week. When this isn’t enough for them, they wage war on our consumerist culture with media-friendly, attention-getting pranks that escalate into mass destruction. I bought all this in the book, because Palahniuk’s fevered first-person narration puts you inside the exhausted rage of powerless young men who are sick of it all. A movie, however, can be a delicate animal, and this one begins boldly and gradually dies.

What happened? The screenplay, by first-timer Jim Uhls, is pretty loyal to the novel; the Narrator, a nameless corporate drudge played by Edward Norton, delivers many of the book’s best lines in sarcastic voice-over. But — and here I must step very lightly in order to avoid major spoilers — what worked on the page, especially the credibility-stretching plot twist, comes off labored on the screen. Readers of the book may sit there wondering how director David Fincher (Seven) will sustain the illusion from scene to scene. Newcomers, in turn, may wonder why many of the scenes are so stilted, with characters entering and exiting as in a screwball play. And when the surprise is sprung, nobody in the audience so much as gasps.

Fincher zeroes in on the dark heart of whatever material he’s given, and in Fight Club his camera burrows around in modern anxiety like a cyberworm munching holes through web pages of narrative. The show-offy tone at the start — whee, let the ride begin! — provides some prickly fun for about the first twenty minutes. And when the sad-sack Narrator meets his future guru — Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), glorious Zen master of chaos — the unstable interaction between Pitt (who’s quite effective) and Norton (who’s atypically dull here when he doesn’t have Pitt to play off) prepares us for a new, stark kind of millennial buddy movie. Tyler and his new disciple start Fight Club, where men savage each other all night; they move in together and live cheerfully in squalor, like a couple of college freshmen.

But then, inevitably and sadly, Fight Club begins to lose steam. We watch the sweaty, half-naked men grapple in rabid ecstasies of blood and torn flesh, and it looks like nothing we’d want to try. We watch the three leads — rounded out by Marla (Helena Bonham Carter, wasted here), a morbid dark flower who beds Tyler — and they hardly seem like functioning persons. When Tyler’s faceless fight-clubbers graduate into black-clad terrorists — “space monkeys” — making soap and nitroglycerin out of human fat, we wonder why nobody ever notices what’s going on. The satirical metaphor of the book is flattened out, made literal, by the frame-by-frame realism of a movie; Fincher exhausts his tricks early on, and he poops out.

Chuck Palahniuk hasn’t been mentioned much in the reviews of Fight Club, except occasionally to point out that he wrote the book it’s based on. Thus, Fincher is getting the credit, as well as the scorn (in negative reviews), for the ideas presented in the movie. This, as usual, is the auteur theory in full bullshit mode. What Fincher does here is to film, sometimes quite skillfully, the passages that Jim Uhls has transferred more or less intact from Palahniuk. On that level — watching the scene-by-scene dramatization of a book I admire — I enjoyed much of the movie. It also needs to be said that this is generally miles above your standard Hollywood adaptation. Most directors and screenwriters might have left out Bob (Meat Loaf), a testicular-cancer survivor whose hormone therapy has endowed him with “bitch tits”; they might have left out the whole subplot dealing with the Narrator’s addiction to attending support groups for illnesses he doesn’t have. The movie has its moments of inspiration — it’s far from a dud. But it may also be yet another example of a book that was just fine as a book — that didn’t need to be made into a film.

Fincher wants Fight Club to be a transgressive, loony pop artifact on the level of A Clockwork Orange and Natural Born Killers; he wants to make, in Tyler’s words, a beautiful and unique snowflake. Yet despite the spasmodic camera gags — some of which are fun — Fight Club feels less like the trailblazing cinematic critique it’s meant to be, and more like a clever rock video. It doesn’t help that Three Kings, with its guided tour of an infected bullet wound, stole Fincher’s thunder. Fight Club has a veneer of stylistic radicalism, but when it comes to the moments of ultraviolence, nothing really challenges us. The explosions are just explosions; the punches are just punches. (We get guided tours of wastebaskets and refrigerators — why? — but no tours of the splintered teeth in a punched face.) Fincher also blows a nice visual running gag that Palahniuk’s book lobbed right into his lap. Earlier, crying into Bob’s bosom, the Narrator leaves a wet impression of his tear-soaked face on Bob’s shirt. Later, the Narrator gets his face slammed into the cement floor during Fight Club. In the book, his face leaves a mask of blood on the floor similar to the mask of tears on the shirt — a flat reflection of his face in extremis. In the movie, it’s just a splatter of blood. The whole movie is essentially just a splatter of blood, with surprisingly little resonance — it’s just spew and spurt all the way down, all ejaculation and no penetration, like a porno loop. This is not a beautiful and unique snowflake.

Who is Tyler Durden? The casting of golden boy Brad Pitt (“I look the way you want to look,” Tyler rants, “I fuck the way you want to fuck”) as a sort of ubermensch, contrasted with Norton’s just plain mensch, is a pretty decent joke. What we see on the screen is a hipster rebel, a goateed Mephisto orchestrating terror and spouting Palahniuk’s juiciest lines slamming the culture. He’s unavoidably attractive, if not quite a role model, and Pitt gives the movie a slight tremble of subversiveness, like a pumped-up Jeffrey Goines who’s been reading Nietzsche and Zen Buddhism. By movie’s end, after his true nature is revealed, Tyler is just as unavoidably diminished. We then have to watch the hapless Narrator race around trying to undo everything Tyler has set in motion, the dreary Marla (who was, I admit, just as dreary in the book) fades from view, and the movie begins to sputter into a nosedive. The final scenes, which try to have it both ways and lack the chill of Palahniuk’s original ending, are borderline embarrassing.

Certain images, certain surrealistically funny bits of business, occasionally made me think “I have to buy this on DVD,” which is in hilarious opposition to the anti-consumerist message the movie is selling. Reading the book, I wasn’t thinking about DVDs. Palahniuk made you ponder the lost masculinity of a generation, the ease with which a charismatic brute like Tyler can assemble disgruntled men and unite them in chaos. The book is a modern horror story about how populist fascism can flourish here, and about why this is the perfect time for it. (The detail of soap made of human fat is no accident.) The movie, unfortunately, is a stylish blank, a countercultural advertisement just as slick as the ads it claims to disdain. The last reel, which departs from the book and gives us movie-ish thrills we’ve seen a hundred times before, is about as saddening a commentary on Hollywood as any I’ve witnessed. What’s even sadder is that those involved with Fight Club think they’ve made something scathing and radical, and that some viewers might agree with them.

The Straight Story

David Lynch began the ’90s with a triumph (Twin Peaks) and finishes it with another one. The Straight Story is based on the true account of Alvin Straight (played here by Richard Farnsworth), a 73-year-old Iowan who sets out to visit his long-estranged brother Lyle, who’s recently had a stroke. Alvin can’t drive — his eyes are too far gone — so he makes the journey on a John Deere lawnmower, pulling along a makeshift trailer where he sleeps and stores his things.

Lynch is best known — some would say most notorious — for his severe, very R-rated shockers exploring the nightside of human sexuality and brutality: Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway. Yet it isn’t at all out of character for him to do this 180-degree turn and make a becalmed, soothing ode to rural life. Lynch, a Montana native, always comes across in interviews as folksy and gee-whiz, despite the heart of darkness beating in most of his work. It’s not an ironic put-on; he really is that way, and The Straight Story brings out a part of him that he’s maybe had to sneak sideways into some of his other movies (Blue Velvet had its folksy moments).

The movie is exquisitely simple, near-plotless, as Alvin makes his slow journey from Iowa to Wisconsin. As always, Lynch draws the scenes out, letting them breathe, giving us time to drink in the images. His measured pacing is completely organic to the subject — a 73-year-old man with two canes, travelling at about five miles an hour on a 1966 lawnmower. We experience life as Alvin does. The cars and trucks zooming by on the highway seem like demons violating the rural space — why are they in such a hurry? There’s a beautifully spooky moment when dozens of bicyclists whoosh past Alvin in a bike race, looking like silent white aliens streaking down the country road, like something out of Close Encounters. Don’t be fooled by the G rating: This is probably the first true art film to come out under the Walt Disney banner.

Veteran actor Farnsworth, who was actually six years older than Alvin when he played the part, gives a stunning near-silent performance. This is a movie of few words (I’d be surprised if the script, by Mary Sweeney and John Roach, came in at much more than 60 pages), with a hero of few words. Lynch and his great cinematographer Freddie Francis get a lot of mileage out of the countryside — the deep blue sky, the rustling corn, the rusty old farm machines chugging in the fields — but the movie is all in Farnsworth’s weathered face, his way of looking at someone and understanding all he needs to understand. “How far along are you?” he asks a sullen runaway girl. She isn’t showing yet; he just knows.

The Straight Story also gives Lynch an opportunity to put slightly askew characters on the screen; as always, he’s not really laughing at them — he respects them, enjoys them for who they are. There’s the set of twin mechanics who fix Alvin’s mower; one of them has a strange bandage on his cheek. There’s the woman who keeps hitting deer with her car no matter how hard she tries not to. There’s the hardware-store clerk who’s moved nearly to tears when Alvin asks to buy the man’s beloved “grabber.” Most radiantly, there’s Alvin’s daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek, who goes way back with Lynch but has never acted for him before), a somewhat slow woman with a vocal hesitancy that hides her essential level-headedness.

This is the only G-rated movie Lynch has directed and probably ever will direct. For that reason, some parents may think it’s a movie they can take their little kids to. While there’s absolutely nothing kids shouldn’t see in The Straight Story, there’s also very little to interest them. The movie is really for mature audiences, and it’s for patient audiences, too. If a meditative pace isn’t your thing, you’d better pass. But for some of us who find subtle, hushed, easygoing movies an immensely refreshing change of pace from today’s usual bang-bang, The Straight Story hits the spot. Leaving the theater, a friend remarked that he’d enjoyed the film, but that nobody would ever say “That movie rocks.” “No,” I said, “it rocks quietly.”

Random Hearts

Slow-moving targets (and I do mean slow-moving) like Random Hearts are almost too easy. C’mon, give it a break: It’s about pain and loss, it tries to be a movie for grown-ups, it … it … No, I can’t do it. It’s a big unnecessary rectangle in the dark, that’s what it is, and it takes up entirely too much of our time. God help anyone who wanders into Random Hearts expecting a few laughs and a few tears: It’s stubbornly unmoving (in all respects), and if it isn’t art or entertainment, what is it?

What it’s not is plausible drama. The premise is that the wife of our hero, Internal Affairs cop Dutch Van Den Broeck (Harrison Ford), and the husband of our heroine, politician Kay Chandler (Kristin Scott Thomas), were carrying on an affair. The cheating spouses were seated together on a plane that went down en route to Miami. So Dutch and Kay are drawn together by their mutual loss and feelings of betrayal; she wants to put the whole sad thing behind her and focus on her congressional race, while he wants to dig around and figure out why his wife was so inconsiderate as to cheat on him and then die before he could bust her for it. At least I think that’s what his crusade is about.

At some point during the crucifyingly dull proceedings — I guess it was during the extremely odd and passionless sex scene between Dutch and Kay in a parked car — I began to amuse myself by thinking of Random Hearts as a somber mainstream version of David Cronenberg’s Crash. Some of the themes are similar: Dutch and Kay share grief and sadness that nobody else understands, like the car-crash cultists in the Cronenberg film. Problem is, Crash was intentionally cold and unromantic, whereas this movie is supposed to be about how these two broken people warm to one another and put each other back together. And it doesn’t work.

Who ever told Harrison Ford he was a romantic leading man? Women may find him sexy in a retro, manly, cowboy-carpenter kind of way, but he lacks the mischievous spark of a Mel Gibson or the self-deprecating boyishness Kevin Costner used to allow himself to show. Kay seems to fall for him because he’s as glum and colorless as she is, and poor Kristin Scott Thomas, after this movie and The Horse Whisperer, is well on her way to becoming Hollywood’s resident cold fish who needs a real man to loosen her up. Put this woman in a comedy again before it’s too late.

The movie, directed at a crawl by Sydney Pollack (as if trying to duplicate the deadly pacing of his climactic scene with Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut), throws in a half dozen needless complications, not the least of which is a corrupt-cop subplot — what is this, The Devil’s Own 2? — that could’ve shortened the film by a good half hour if taken out. Kay worries about the impact the affair — both her husband’s and the one she’s having with Dutch — might have on her campaign, while Dutch can’t let go of the idea that his wife lied to him. Every so often they sit around together and occasionally manifest strange little things on their faces — could those actually be smiles? In a movie as morose as this? Or maybe it’s just gas. (Ford’s performance here makes his burned-out cop in Blade Runner look like Ed Grimley.)

One neat way to do Random Hearts might have been as a dark comedy. Why not have Kay’s husband be a worthless wimp dragging her campaign down, or why not make Dutch’s wife a sharp-tongued bitch? Then they could actually be relieved that their cheating spouses went down in flames, so that they could get together and have some fun. But fun is alien to this movie, and we don’t even notice much affection between the respective couples when the cheating spouses are still alive. So we don’t feel anything has been lost, except maybe 133 minutes of our lives.

Three Kings

Every year or so, a big, serious studio movie thunders into view; the critics, tired of teen junk and overawed by any film remotely intended for adults, declare it a masterpiece and spill lots of magazine ink (cover stories, interviews tied to reviews, etc). Three Kings is one such movie, and the surprise is that it’s actually pretty good. It has a distinctive look and feel, an atmosphere of burnout and chaos; it launches at a high energy level and generally stays there. The buzz, however, wears off fast. As with Natural Born Killers, the roughhouse style leaves an afterimage, but the serious points the film tries to make don’t follow you home.

We’re in Iraq, right after Operation Desert Storm has reached its anticlimax. Many of the soldiers stationed in the Gulf have been pumped up for combat, but it’s been a smart-bomb, PlayStation war — death from above, but not much excitement on the ground. We meet a few of these soldiers just marking time in the sand: nice guy Troy (Mark Wahlberg), born-again Chief (Ice Cube), callous redneck Vig (Spike Jonze), and cynical Special Forces captain Archie Gates (George Clooney). They’re all itching for adventure, and they find it in a map that may lead to millions of dollars’ worth of stolen Kuwaiti gold bullion hidden in one of Saddam’s bunkers.

In a way, writer-director David O. Russell (who previously did the acclaimed indie comedies Spanking the Monkey and Flirting with Disaster) is itching for action, too. You can feel his excitement at painting on a broad canvas full of hair-trigger shootouts and exploding trucks. But I’m afraid he also wants us to consider the human cost of the same violence he thrills us with, and this doesn’t always work. The movie shifts tones many times, and though that doesn’t bother me, Three Kings loses some of its disreputable charge when it starts going human on us. Like many directors before him, Russell can’t resolve the complex issue of anti-violence movie violence and our complicated response to it.

What we have here is an attempt at a thinking person’s adventure film — it even pauses to show us exactly what a bullet can do to a man’s innards, the infected pockets of flesh filling with bile — and on that level, compared with the stupid and meaningless concussive epics we usually get, Three Kings is near the head of its class. The characters are sketched in for us in a backhanded, wise-ass manner; the central figure, Archie Gates, is also the least developed — he’s your basic cynic who sticks his neck out for nobody, until he gradually learns compassion — and George Clooney simply seems to be walking in the footsteps of a hundred change-of-heart anti-heroes before him. He knows how to take charge, though, and he and his fellow actors, in Archie’s words, do whatever’s necessary at any given moment.

While you’re watching it, Three Kings feels like a hipper, bolder breed of war movie, with its hallucinatory left-out-in-the-sun photography (cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel did the honors) and its satirical swipes at American pop culture invading Iraq. Afterward, though, what you remember are the scenes of moral awakening that generally bring the movie to a dead stop. Three Kings begins like an action-comedy and ends as a message movie bucking for Oscars. It tells us that saving human lives (Archie and his crew eventually try to get some Iraqi refugees over the border to freedom) is nobler than grabbing the gold — a comforting moral the American audience is always ready to hear, if not always to heed. Greed and dictatorship: bad. Compassion: good. It doesn’t take much to be a media masterpiece these days.