From The Guardian: Being John Malkovich at 20: why the surrealist comedy demands a rewatch

Being John Malkovich at 20: why the surrealist comedy demands a rewatch

Being John Malkovich, 1999 Photograph: Allstar/Propaganda Films/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

When Being John Malkovich opened in 1999, nobody knew the name of its screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, who’d spent the previous 15 years laboring in the comedy salt mines, submitting articles on spec to National Lampoon, writing a number of unproduced pilots, and landing gigs on short-lived (if beloved) sketch shows like Get a Life and The Dana Carvey Show. Yet as soon as it premiered – and for every project he did afterwards – it was talked about as a Charlie Kaufman film, even though it was directed by Spike Jonze, whose work on innovative commercials and videos for Weezer (Buddy Holly), Beastie Boys (Sabotage), and others had earned him a reputation as one of the most sought-after talents in the business. This was virtually unprecedented; even Robert Towne, whose script for Chinatown is frequently cited among the best ever written, wasn’t credited over its director, Roman Polanski.

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Still, it was only natural to cite Kaufman for the inspired absurdity of his premise, which treats the very specific consciousness of an esteemed character actor as the site for a grown-up Alice in Wonderland, a place where people can escape their sad, desperate lives for 15 minutes before getting thrown out on to a ditch by the New Jersey Turnpike. It was Kaufman who imagined The Belle of Amherst performed by a 60ft tall Emily Dickinson puppet (“gimmicky bastard”), a workplace conceived for the short-statured on the 7½th floor of a nondescript office building (“The overhead is low!”), and 44-year-old humans as vessels for those who want to live forever. And none of that even accounts for the random one-liners and conceits that are jammed into the screenplay, or the emotional richness of its themes, from loneliness to self-loathing to yearning, and how love can transcend bodies and genders.

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Spike Jonze and John Malkovich on set. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext Collection/Sportsphoto/Allstar/Cinetext Collection

The best of Kaufman’s work after Being John Malkovich has clarified his approach to storytelling. Through various high-concept, off-the-wall conceits – a screenwriter named “Charlie Kaufman” struggling to adapt The Orchid Thief (Adaptation), a surgery that erases memories of a failed relationship (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), a theater production that metastasizes like a cancer (Synecdoche, New York), a stop-motion world where everyone is the same (Anomalisa) – he balances absurdist comedy with insight into specific human vulnerabilities. These enormous and crazily ornate apparatuses are constructed around sentiments that are touchingly precious, like the value of holding on to even painful memories or, in this case, the lengths we’ll go to make ourselves appealing to those we desire.
The film also introduces the Charlie Kaufman type: pasty and disheveled, with bad hair and lumpen bodies and a thin film of flopsweat on the face. He’s not a hero, either, which is another great and rare quality Kaufman has as a screenwriter. He doesn’t want his characters to be loved; he’ll settle for them being identifiable and understood. To that end, Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) is a self-involved artiste, obsessed with getting some recognition for his uncompromising work as a realist puppeteer, but mostly languishing in a cramped, lightless garden apartment with his wife Lotte (a frizzy-haired Cameron Diaz) and her pet parrot and chimpanzee. Soon after his nimble fingers land him a job as a file clerk at LesterCorp, a company on the 7½th floor of the Mertin-Flemmer Building in New York, he falls hard for the glamorous Maxine (Catherine Keener), who wants nothing to do with him.