There is a door on the seventh-and-a-half floor of the Mertin-Flemmer building. Craig Schwartz, an unemployed puppeteer, finds it while filing. He crawls through, and for fifteen minutes he is John Malkovich. Then he is dropped onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. That is the whole premise of Being John Malkovich, and it is still the strangest thing USA Films put its name on in 1999.
Spike Jonze directed it. Charlie Kaufman wrote it. Both were making their feature debut. USA Films released it, and it grossed $23 million against a $13 million budget. It was nominated in three categories at the 72nd Academy Awards: Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress for Catherine Keener.
9 of 10. The score is not in doubt. What follows is why.
Trailer, via Focus Features.
Craig Schwartz and the Floor Between Floors
John Cusack plays Craig, a puppeteer in New York City with no work and a marriage that has gone quiet. Cameron Diaz plays his wife, Lotte, who is obsessed with pets. He takes a job as a file clerk for Dr. Lester, played by Orson Bean, on a floor wedged between the 7th and 8th where the ceiling is so low the employees have to stoop.
Craig falls for a co-worker, Maxine Lund, played by Catherine Keener. She does not fall back. While filing, he opens a small hidden door, crawls into an earthen tunnel, and ends up inside the head of the actor John Malkovich — played by John Malkovich, as a fictionalized version of himself.
The film is a comedy, a drama and a fantasy at once. The tagline was blunt about the offer: “Ever wanted to be someone else? Now you can.”
Maxine Lund Sells the Experience
Craig tells Maxine about the door. She sees the business before he sees anything. They charge customers to use it. W. Earl Brown appears as the first J.M. Inc. customer.
Lotte goes through the portal and comes out fascinated by the idea of becoming a man. She and Craig visit Dr. Lester’s home, where Lotte finds a room packed with Malkovich memorabilia.
Then the film turns. Maxine sets up a date with Malkovich while Lotte is inside him. Lotte falls for Maxine. Maxine returns it — but only when Lotte is inside Malkovich’s body. Maxine manipulates Malkovich into having sex with her while Lotte is in his mind.
That is the hinge of the whole picture. The portal starts as a joke and ends as a weapon.
A Puppeteer Takes the Controls
Craig, abandoned by both women, locks Lotte in a cage and makes her set up another meeting with Maxine. Then he goes in himself. Inside Malkovich, Craig finds that his puppeteering skill gives him some control over the body he is wearing.
The real Malkovich is disturbed by his loss of control. He confides in his friend Charlie Sheen, playing himself, and starts to suspect Maxine. He follows her to the Mertin-Flemmer building, where she and Craig are charging customers at the door. After a loud argument with Craig, Malkovich goes through the portal himself and lands in a world where everyone has his face and says only one word.
“Malkovich.”
He is ejected. That is as far as the source takes the sequence, and it is enough.
What the Cast Was Asked to Do
Diaz’s make-up artist, Gucci Westman, called styling her for the role “a challenge, to make her look homely.” The script carried almost no physical description of the characters, so Diaz did not know going in that “people weren’t going to recognize me.”
- Cusack asked his agent for the “craziest, most unproduceable script you can find,” read it, and asked to be booked for an audition.
- Keener took the part of Maxine because of Jonze’s earlier work in music videos, even though she disliked the character and did not think she fit it. She was nominated for an Oscar for it.
- Malkovich was not a late substitution. Kaufman said the screenplay “was always ‘Being John Malkovich’, even before I had any expectation that John Malkovich would even read the script.”
Kaufman picked Malkovich partly for an “enigmatic quality about him that works,” and partly for the sound of the name. He said that when they tried alternatives, “we found that a lot of them weren’t fun to say.”
Getting him took a phone call. Jonze’s then-father-in-law, Francis Ford Coppola, was able to reach Malkovich. Jonze flew to Malkovich’s home in France with producer Sandy Stern. Stern said Malkovich was “half intrigued and half horrified” by the script. He agreed anyway.
441st on Empire’s List, 90th on Premiere’s
The film drew widespread acclaim, with praise aimed at the writing and the direction. It grossed $23 million against a $13 million budget.
The honors followed. Three Oscar nominations: Best Director for Jonze, Best Original Screenplay for Kaufman, Best Supporting Actress for Keener. Empire ranked the film 441st on its 2008 list of the 500 greatest films of all time. Premiere ranked Malkovich’s performance number 90 on its “100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time.”
Those two placements are worth separating. The Empire ranking is a claim about the film. The Premiere ranking is a claim about a performance, and it is the more interesting one, because Malkovich is playing a version of himself who is not in control of himself. He is the subject of the movie and also its straight man.
What Maxine Lund Actually Wants
The premise is a stunt. The execution is not. Kaufman wrote a script that treats a portal into a famous man’s head as an asset to be priced, sold and fought over.
The part that matters most is not the portal. It is Maxine. Keener’s character is the one who understands immediately that the door is worth money, and she is the one who uses it to get what she wants from both Lotte and Craig. The film’s subject is what people will do to be inside someone else’s life, and who gets to charge them for it.
A movie where John Malkovich plays John Malkovich sounds like a sketch. It is not one, because Kaufman refused to write it as one. He said the screenplay was always this, before he had any reason to think Malkovich would read it.
Twenty-seven years on, the film’s central image has not aged. A man crawls into a tunnel to escape his own life for fifteen minutes, and someone else is already waiting to sell him the ticket.
9 of 10.
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