I had held off on watching Being John Malkovich for a while, mostly because I think I had a pretty good idea of what it was and, while I wanted to watch it at some point, it never felt particularly urgent. (The vision in my head was a sort of Bosch painting filled with John Malkovich, which of course is true of exactly one scene [and perhaps the most indelible and famous of the film.])

Having finally gotten around to watching it, the biggest surprise was just how large the gulf was between my preconception of this thing — a silly art experiment of a movie — and the reality of it, a script and set filled with humor and wit and a thousand different ideas. ^[1]

John Cusack plays a Nice Guy (not to be confused with a nice guy); Catherine Keener plays what I think we'd recognize today as an evil twin version of a MPDG; Cameron Diaz's (out of type!) performance was, for me, the show-stopper. It is really hard to seriously play a non-serious person: she does it with aplomb, and her arc is the soul and sugar of the movie that rescues it from collapsing into self-indulgence.

The worst thing a piece of comedy can do is, in the process of not taking itself seriously, it forgets to take its characters seriously. This film is deeply funny, and deeply weird, but Kaufman remembers every step of the way that these people are real, that they want things and feel things. (And I'm sure there are a lot of interesting things it's saying at a metatextual level, but I figure I should finish watching Adaptation before I mull on those too heavily.)

★★★★