Old Yorker

  • Being John Malkovich

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

     

  • Lost in Translation

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sofia Coppola (2003)

    Straining for up-to-the-minute cultural relevance, The Devil Wears Prada 2 seems to have succeeded in ways it didn’t intend.   A ‘Controversies’ section on the film’s Wikipedia page describes – at length – a brouhaha about the minor character of Anne Hathaway’s PA Jin Chao (played by Chinese-American actress Helen J Shen) – specifically, ‘the alleged use of racist tropes’ in relation to Jin Chao’s name and personal characteristics.  The whole thing reads like a parody of woke zealotry.  Still, it was an instructive coincidence that, just two days after seeing Prada 2, I watched Lost in Translation for the first time in twenty years or more.  Despite the overwhelmingly positive reactions to writer-director Sofia Coppola’s Tokyo-set romantic comedy-drama in 2003, it did attract accusations of racism, even then, for its portrayal of the Japanese.  Lost in Translation simply couldn’t be made nowadays.

    It hadn’t occurred to me beforehand that the Japanese jokes would be a problem.  I don’t remember their being so on previous viewings, but times have changed and I must have changed with them (never mind that the Prada 2 controversy is still preposterous).  On Lost in Translation‘s original release, Sofia Coppola began her response to criticisms of racial stereotyping with ‘I can see why people might think that, but I know I’m not racist …’  Even that defence – the racist’s near-default words of assurance – makes you cringe now.  There’s no getting away from Coppola’s reliance on the long-dependable comedy of Asians mispronouncing the English ‘r’ sound as ‘l’.  She does so repeatedly in the scene where the film’s protagonist, American actor Bob Harris (Bill Murray), in Tokyo to shoot a Suntory whisky commercial, is confronted in his hotel room by a Japanese prostitute, who urges him to ‘lip my stockings’.  In the studio where the whisky ad’s being filmed, its director explains that he wants Bob to come across like a member of the Lat Pack, or as James Bond (Loger Moore, that is).

    Although I smiled with discomfort this time around, I did still smile – Bill Murray gave me no option.  Besides, there’s much more than racial humour at work here.  Bob Harris is a Hollywood movie star on the way down.  People know his face but don’t really remember his films (they just know they loved that one with the car chase).  You get the strong impression that commercials are his most lucrative work these days.  He’s also a husband and father in an unhappy marriage.  Bob didn’t order the excitable, sub-femme-fatale sex worker (Nao Asuka) who knocks on his door (some kind of fixer at the hotel sent her).  His incomprehension of what she’s instructing him to do reflects, on the simple linguistic level, the implication of Coppola’s title, but Bob’s weary bewilderment also expresses a frazzled state of mind that’s both temporary (he’s still jet lagged) and chronic.  The racial jokes in Lost in Translation are very awkward now.  In other respects, the film has aged well.

    In the same hotel, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is staying with her husband John (Giovanni Ribisi), who photographs celebrities and is ‘shooting a band’ in Tokyo.  A recent Yale graduate (in philosophy), Charlotte is less than half Bob’s age.  Her marriage, compared with his, is also very young but it’s soon evident that she’s dissatisfied with herself – she did have vague writing ambitions but now has no idea what to do next – and with her self-absorbed husband.  When Bob and his wife talk on the phone, her main concern is apparently carpet samples (‘you were right about the burgundy’).  He and Charlotte have already exchanged looks, then conversation in the hotel bar, by the time John’s work takes him away from central Tokyo for a few days.  While he’s away, Charlotte and Bob spend time together.  They enjoy the city’s nightlife, including a karaoke place where both sing (she does The Pretenders’ ‘Brass in Pocket’, he does Roxy Music’s ‘More Than This’ and Elvis Costello’s ‘(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding’).  They visit a hospital to get treatment on the toe that she stubbed in her hotel room a few days ago.  They grow close.

    Only eighteen at the time (even younger than her character’s meant to be), Scarlett Johansson had appeared in plenty of films by the time she made Lost in Translation, most notably Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2001).  Within a few weeks of the opening of Coppola’s film, Johansson was also in cinemas as the title character in Peter Webber’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.  She plays that role well but Webber’s film, as might be expected, gives her a chiefly pictorial purpose.  In Lost in Translation, she’s emotionally fluid, and precociously good at suggesting quiet melancholy.  But this is Bill Murray’s film and – with all due respect to his big hits like Ghostbusters (1984) and Groundhog Day (1993), not forgetting his brilliant contribution to Tootsie (1982) – his finest hour in cinema.  Murray melds his trademark deadpan comedy with romantic yearning to truly memorable effect.

    It’s easy to say that’s it easy for an actor to play an actor, but foolish to say, too.  Bob is exasperated by the whisky commercial’s hyper director (Yutaka Tadokoro) and his relentlessly upbeat Japanese hosts generally, but he’s doing a job and Murray is professionally obliging to just the right degree.  That means letting the audience see what these other people on screen don’t see.  Bob’s fatigue with being a public figure is always anchored in sad and guilty feelings about his personal life.  His few days with Charlotte both refresh Bob and, in doing so, intensify his unhappiness, while she finds in him the security of a father figure, as well as a funny man to whom she’s attracted.  There’s a scene where they lie side by side on a bed, watching television, but that’s as close as they get physically – at least until their parting embrace.  In the meantime, Bob sleeps with the singer (Catherine Lambert) from Sausalito, the hotel lounge trio.  Charlotte is naturally upset when she finds this out the next morning, but the one-night stand, from Bob’s point of view, makes an odd kind of emotional sense.  It happens mechanically, vindicates his self-reproach, and keeps the unconsummated relationship with Charlotte special.

    Bob’s jaded, Charlotte’s adrift, but they both always know they have worrying marriages to return to.  Lost in Translation is, then, a strong dual character study and a distinctive romance.  The exotic setting allows it to expand into something larger, speaking to the emotional fundamentals of being in a strange place for a short time.  The utter foreignness of the new locale, its sights and sounds, language and rhythms – how enchanting, invigorating and alienating this all can be.  The peculiar loneliness of hotel rooms.  The desperate strain of feeling obliged to enjoy tourist attractions:  Charlotte feels nothing at a Buddhist temple she visits, whereas chancing upon a wedding ceremony absorbs her.  Coppola and her cinematographer Lance Acord capture these themes imaginatively.  Perhaps the standout image is Bob on a dazzling green golf course in the foreground, Mount Fuji mysterious in the background.

    Sofia Coppola was in a privileged position.  Like her directing debut, The Virgin Suicides (1999), this sophomore feature was financially supported by American Zoetrope, co-founded by her father in the 1970s (in 2007, Sofia and her brother Roman became the company’s co-owners).  Even so, the picture was made outside the Hollywood studio system, with a small crew, on what sounds like – even a quarter-century ago – an almost indie budget of $4m.  This is an artistically ambitious film that took well over $100m at the box office.  Like the funny-foreigner jokes, that combination seems to date Lost in Translation; unlike the jokes, in a good way.

    8 May 2026

     

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