Being John Malkovich
Spike Jonze (1999)
US cinema’s annus mirabilis of 1999 was just that – a year. Unlike the early 1970s, this wasn’t the start or end of a longer period of high achievement: outstanding American-made films were thin on the ground in 1998, again in 2000. Yet the intervening year saw the release of American Beauty, Magnolia, Sweet and Lowdown, The Talented Mr Ripley, Three Kings – and Being John Malkovich. Spike Jonze’s debut feature isn’t quite on the level of the first two in that list but still remarkable. Like American Beauty and Magnolia, Being John Malkovich was the work of a very young filmmaker: Sam Mendes was thirty-four at the time; Paul Thomas Anderson hadn’t yet turned thirty; Jonze was thirty-one. Being John Malkovich was written by a slightly older man who was, however, another cinema debutant – forty-one-year-old Charlie Kaufman. I’d not seen Being John Malkovich since its original release. I liked it in 2000 and like it now, even though it’s impossible at this distance in time to recapture the excitement of how inventive Kaufman’s screenplay felt back then. His screenplay predicts what would become familiar preoccupations and tropes in his later work. Fear of death. An obsessive male protagonist who rarely puts a foot right.
The first hour of Spike Jonze’s film is as sheerly entertaining as it’s thoroughly unpredictable. Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) is a puppeteer in present-day New York City – a busker, otherwise out of work. His adult-themed puppet street performances are risky: Craig gets thumped by the father of a little boy who rushes up to watch his Abelard and Heloise show. Craig gazes enviously at a TV news report of a professional rival, who performs The Belle of Amherst, with a sixty-foot Emily Dickinson puppet, to an admiring crowd. ‘Gimmicky bastard,’ Craig grumbles. He’s married to Lotte (Cameron Diaz), who works in a pet shop. It’s debatable as to whether the couple have children. There’s discussion between them about having a baby, but their cramped apartment is already home to dogs, cats, a parrot, an iguana and Elijah, a highly anthropomorphised chimpanzee. Lotte is giving Elijah psychotherapy to sort out a ‘suppressed childhood trauma’.
In response to a newspaper ad that stipulates ‘quick hands’, Craig applies for a temporary job as a filing clerk. Reporting for interview at the Mertin-Flemmer building, he encounters a receptionist (Mary Kay Place) who’s severely deaf and impatiently oblivious to the fact. He’s interviewed by Dr Lester (Orson Bean), who believes – thanks to the receptionist – that he’s incomprehensible because of a serious speech impediment, although he speaks perfectly clearly. Craig passes the interview with flying colours and starts work on floor 7½, where the staff stoop to move around under ceilings less than five feet high. Craig soon feels a strong attraction to a colleague, Maxine Lund (Catherine Keener), who makes clear the attraction isn’t mutual. As she explains, Craig’s vocation is the problem: ‘You’re not someone I could get interested in – you play with dolls’. At home in the evenings, that’s just what Craig does to indulge his fantasies. He makes puppets of himself and Maxine and invents conversations between them. The Craig puppet’s answer to the Maxine puppet’s question as to why he loves puppeteering is, ‘Perhaps it’s the idea of becoming someone else for a little while. Being inside another skin’. One day at work, Craig finds a hidden door behind a filing cabinet, opens it and crawls through a tunnel. He finds himself inside the head of John Malkovich (John Malkovich). After fifteen minutes there, Craig is ejected and lands roadside on the New Jersey Turnpike.
There are echoes of Alice in Wonderland, most obviously the rabbit-hole portal to John Malkovich’s mind and body (and floor 7½’s dimensions call to mind oversized Alice in the White Rabbit’s house). But Jonze and Kaufman have already created a real world so topsy-turvy that the one into which Craig is transported, though impossible, seems more straightforward – at first anyway. When Craig tells Lotte and Maxine about the portal, they’re respectively sceptical and enthused – Maxine sees its commercial potential: she and Craig can greatly augment their modest wages by selling tickets to the public to be John Malkovich for fifteen minutes. Things are complicated by the two women’s own experiences of the portal and the feelings it awakens. Malkovich is in the shower when Lotte gets inside his head. Back with Craig, she declares herself sexually fulfilled as a male body and decides she wants to own one. Like her husband, Lotte develops a passion for Maxine. Maxine reciprocates this passion, though only when Lotte is incarnated as John Malkovich. She also now has the same feelings about Craig, when he enters Malkovich. Quite what turns Maxine on isn’t easy to say – maybe being in charge and sensing the craving of whichever of Craig or Lotte happens to be inhabiting Malkovich, with whom Maxine starts an affair.
The host becomes suspicious and wants to know what’s going on. Malkovich gets himself into the portal and emerges into a world entirely peopled by John Malkoviches – to be more precise, a busy restaurant where men, women and children all have John Malkovich heads. There’s a long list of dishes on the menu, each one called Malkovich. The diners’ vocabulary is similarly restricted. Meanwhile, when Craig and Lotte visit the house of eccentric Dr Lester, she discovers a room filled with Malkovich memorabilia. It turns out that Lester is really Captain Mertin, who erected the Mertin-Flemmer building in the late nineteenth century to conceal the portal to a ‘vessel body’ that Mertin had discovered on the spot. Since then, Mertin has dodged mortality by moving from one host to the next – always on the latter’s forty-fourth birthday, when the host body is ‘ripe’: one day late and Mertin would be trapped in the body of a newborn. This time around, Mertin/Lester has invited a group of elderly friends to accompany him on board John Malkovich.
The story is ingenious but Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, having constructed this comic-metaphysical tangled web, must then devise an exit route. They do work things out, but Being John Malkovich starts to show the strain. When Maxine becomes Malkovich’s lover and with Lotte wanting to leave him for Maxine, Craig is forced into desperate measures. He locks his wife in a cage. More literally manipulative than Maxine, Craig finds he can, thanks to his puppetry skills, exercise a degree of physical control over Malkovich’s body. He takes it over for a period of months, during which time Maxine becomes pregnant. There are some very funny details arising from these events. Elijah the chimp, in the best tradition of Hollywood psychoanalytic melodrama, has a flashback to the key trauma in his past – when his parents were captured by monkey poachers in the jungle and his mother begged Elijah to untie them. His failure to do so left profound psychic scars; now that he suddenly understands these, Elijah makes amends by opening the cage of his de facto mother Lotte. Inside John Malkovich, Craig turns his host into a world-class puppeteer. Responding to an acting peer’s huge success in this career departure, Sean Penn as-himself acknowledges, in a fine bit of straight-faced faux-documentary, that he and others will probably follow suit. Yet details are all that these are. You’re interested to see how Being John Malkovich will conclude, but without enjoying so much its later, somewhat frenetic stages (I’ll pass on summarising those).
In the three Charlie Kaufman screenplays that followed this one – for Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002), George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) – the hapless male lead was allowed a happy or at least spared an unhappy ending. That stopped once Kaufman begin to direct his own scripts – for Synecdoche, New York (2008), Anomalisa (2015) and I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020). Being John Malkovich anticipates that trilogy’s bleakness-is-all outcome for the main man. A seven-years-later epilogue to the main action sees an older John Malkovich hosting Dr Lester and his group. The life-extending portal now leads into the mind of Maxine’s little daughter, Emily. Suffice to say that Craig Schwartz mistimed his climactic portral entrance, arriving too late to go back inside Malkovich, too soon to control newborn Emily. Trapped inside the little girl, doubly cuckolded Craig is condemned to watch Lotte and Maxine live happy ever after.
After making street skateboarding videos in the early 1990s, Spike Jonze soon became an in-demand director of music videos, for big-name clients. (They included REM and Michael Stipe was a producer of Being John Malkovich.) Given his film-making background and inexperience in cinema, Jonze shows remarkable self-control in presenting the surreal happenings of Kaufman’s story in quite a realistic style. (The cinematographer was Lance Acord, who would go on to shoot Adaptation and the next two films by Sofia Coppola, who was married to Jonze between 1999 and 2003.) Being John Malkovich is very well acted, especially by witty Catherine Keener. Although Cameron Diaz might seem too glamorous for her role, her casting works out well. John Cusack never was an actor to impose himself strongly on a narrative, yet you miss him as Craig disappears increasingly from view. The person with the hardest role is unquestionably John Malkovich, who may be playing himself or a public perception of his personality, or what the characters in Charlie Kaufman’s story need Malkovich to be – or a combination of all these. I felt when I first saw the film and still feel now that Malkovich ends up with rather too much screen time, but he was brave to agree to the project in the first place and is admirably game for anything. The puppets – created by Kamela Portuges-Robbins and Images in Motion, animated by Phillip Huber – are truly extraordinary.
10 May 2026