Saturday 18 July 2020

Being John Malkovich (1999)

“I’m sorry, I have no time for piddling suggestions from mumbling job applicants.”

This is the weirdest, and perhaps the best, film I've ever seen. David Lynch: that there thing on the floor looks like a gauntlet.

This is magnificently, yet confidently weird. It’s not only surreal: it’s philosophical, cultured, Pythonesque, a morality tale and more. The very concept is delightfully mad, and the way things play out is inspired in how staid narrative conventions are adroitly avoided, yet by the end of the film, miraculously, it all actually makes narrative sense on its own terms, even if one’s mind has been screwed with splendidly. This is a dense, layered film, full of clever literary allusions, yet never anything other than lightly playful.

The cast are, without exception, superb- Cusack especially, and of course Malkovich, but Catherine Keener is a revelation as the cooly amoral Maxine, while Orson Bean gives the perfect comic performance.

You can, of course, expect to see many more Charlie Kaufman films in this blog within a very short space of time. Why oh why did I not see this film until I was forty-three?

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