Charlie Kaufman's Angels: Being John Malkovich
With the upcoming release of Charlie Kaufman’s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”, a retrospective on the writer/director is just what the therapist ordered.
As I typed out the phrase “Charlie Kaufman retrospective” into my calendar, a chuckle escaped my breath somewhat subconsciously. Retrospective? That’s redundant. For 21 years, Kaufman, a lampooner-turned-auteur, has delivered films often about looking inward and looking backward. Films about falling deep into the past while retreating from the future, films about sweaty late-night existentialism. To look back at a man whose body of work is built on the idea of looking back, well, that’s about as retrospective as it gets. This year, the writer/director’s feature film career has reached legal drinking age, it’s time to make a toast to all of Charlie Kaufman’s ‘Angels’ beginning with his very first— a burst into and foray into a man named John Malkovich.
“Being John Malkovich”, written by Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze, is a twisting of an otherwise familiar tale. Craig (John Cusack), a perspiring down-on-his-luck puppeteer shelves away his creative ambitions to get a “real job”. Through his determination to make his wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) happy, he secures a position as a file filer (a very serious job indeed), literally hunching himself to roam the halls of Floor 7 1/2, a seemingly hilarious affirmative action initiative for the benefit of little people everywhere. Craig’s new purpose as a file filer leads him down a path to an overly ambitious co-worker named Maxine (Catherine Keener) and of course, a portal into the mind of famed character actor, John Malkovich. The deep descent into Craig’s experiential reckoning begins as he turns Malkovich into a business. 200 bucks to take dip inside and control the strings. With a story so overwhelmingly unique, “Being John Malkovich” became a Lynchian, body-snatching, fanatical smorgasbord of a film. To think that it came seemingly out of thin air was seemingly magical.
However, the first pillar of Kaufman’s existential empire was not built overnight. The film trickled its way into 1999 alongside the likes of “Magnolia”, “Fight Club”, “The Matrix” and other heavy hitters. “Being John Malkovich” was one of Hollywood’s biggest gambles, and eventually became the bet that catapulted Kaufman (and to some extent, Jonze) onto the center stage. Kaufman wrote the script in 1994, only to have it racketed around from production company to production company, a tetherball with nowhere to go once the spinning stopped. Through a twist of fate, it would end up in the hands of the hands of the John Malkovich himself, who happened to be doing some leisure reading on a plane to Europe. Malkovich immediately wanted in.
The preproduction of the film became notorious in the industry due to Kaufman’s convictions when it came to his vision. In a medium that was long-thought to be the director’s canvas, an auteur screenwriter like Kaufman was something quite unusual. Luckily for Kaufman, that is not what happened. “Being John Malkovich” would become a dizzying critical and audience success, a dark-horse darling of 90’s cinema, and regarded among critics who put together retrospectives of Charlie Kaufman’s career. No one knew this at the time of the film’s release, but, aside from being a catalyst for Kaufman’s acclaim, “Being John Malkovich” would craft a thesis statement outlining themes and explorations that he would later imbue into his subsequent works.
How fitting it is that “Being John Malkovich” begins with curtains opening to a puppet show. Cusack’s performance as a tortured puppeteer gives insight into Kaufman’s craft, his neuroses, and his relationship with life’s deepest (and darkest) questions. Who pulls the strings? What’s behind the scenes? How far can one go for their art. In the case of “Being John Malkovich”, it turns out that distance is quite far and those ‘strings’ of tragedy finally snap in the third act as we learn the essence of existence and tragedy; the maddening artist must go mad, creators will create no matter what the consequence.
In rousing fashion, we jump across genres showered with melodrama, humor, and surrealism. From it’s marionette dance routines, to it’s perfect placement of a certain Octavia Spencer, to the Noah’s Ark of animals that parade through the story (and right into his next script, might I add), Kaufman’s introduction is a spectacular cabinet of curiosities. The film’s most famous sequence in which the titular celebrity enters his own portal only to confront an army of Malkoviches (or whatever the plural of Malkovich is) perfectly encapsulates one of Kaufman’s strengths as an auteur— his ability to capture the chaos. It’s a skill that he would demonstrate again and again in almost all of his scripts. Whether it’s a hunt for an orchid, a trek across memory, or a trip to a book convention, Kaufman’s reflective, melancholic chaos is often one of his main attractions.
Not only did “Being John Malkovich” spark shock and awe, but it delivered nuance, heavy social critique, and life’s toughest questions. It was chaos through a funhouse mirror. This is the exhilarating promise that Kaufman brought alongside his debut in 1999, that would become his trademark throughout his career.