Insiders and Way Insiders
Being John
Malkovich
is everything I've ever dreamed of in a crazy comedy. It's
close to pure farce, yet its laughs are grounded in loneliness, impotence,
self-loathing, and that most discomfiting of vices to dramatize: envy. The
action is surreal, the emotions are violently real. The screenwriter, Charlie
Kaufman, is a genius at finding slapstick correlatives for people's nebulous
sense--or non-sense--of themselves. It's possible that no one has ever come up
with a more absurdly perfect metaphor for our longing to be
someone--anyone--other than who we are than a portal into the head of John
Malkovich.
Kaufman's protagonist,
Craig Schwartz (John Cusack), is a soulfully unkempt puppeteer whose wildly
ambitious work is ignored while his gimmicky rivals thrive. When he reports for
a drudge job as a file clerk, the office is between the seventh and eighth
floors of a Manhattan skyscraper--it's the seven-and-a-halfth floor, where
people walk stooped and make feeble jokes about the "low overhead." That low
ceiling--a constant reminder of how Craig has been stunted--is the first sign
of the movie's comic astuteness, of its knack for devising sight gags with a
sting. When a sleek and derisive colleague named Maxine (Catherine Keener)
rebuffs his advances and mocks his art, Craig argues passionately on behalf of
his puppets: He says that everyone longs to be inside someone else's head. On
cue, he discovers a passageway behind a file cabinet that whooshes him into the
head of Malkovich and then disgorges him, after 20 minutes, into a ditch beside
the New Jersey Turnpike. The poor sap can't keep his secret. He tells the girl,
who is soon selling tickets to the Malkovich experience. The biggest Malkovich
addict turns out to be Craig's nerdily frazzled wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), who
sums up the thrill for the rest of the characters. "Being inside did something
to me," she says. "I knew who I was."
The director, Spike Jonze (he played the skinny redneck in
Three Kings ), comes to Being
John Malkovich from music
videos, but the movie isn't a digitized bag of tricks like Fight
Club . Jonze is never in your face: His instincts must have told him that
hyping gags this outlandish would turn the picture into camp. He keeps the
action slightly remote and the jokes deadpan, and the upshot is that the
audience almost never stops giggling. The first hour and change has a magical
fluidity. The scenes between Cusack and Keener boast the best emasculating
banter since Christopher Durang's Beyond Therapy , and when Lotte and
Maxine begin to communicate erotically through Malkovich's body, the film
becomes a transsexual (and transcendental) screwball comedy. The script has a
free-association quality that turns audiences on--they love not knowing where
they're going. I wonder if Kaufman, when he started writing, even knew that the
protagonist would stumble on that portal, or what he'd find when he went
through. (The head of John Malkovich??!!??)
That the vessel is
Malkovich might be the movie's most brilliantly unsettling touch, since the
actor--although undeniably great--is one of our most distant and weirdly
insular. You can understand the masses fantasizing about being Bruce Willis or
being Tom Hanks, but being John Malkovich? What's lodged under that thick brow
is anybody's guess. Evidently quite the heterosexual, he still courts sexual
ambiguity: He speaks in querulous tones and bats the most insolently feminine
lashes this side of Bugs Bunny. Weird or not, though, he's a celebrity: He
exists. And Malkovich makes a wonderful Malkovich. The actor sends up his own
preening aloofness, and he has never been more emotionally exposed than when it
dawns on him that his smug façade has been literally penetrated. When he
attempts to fathom what's happening to him, Jonze and Kaufman deliver a coup
de cinema --a vision of hell that isn't, à la Sartre, other people, but
oneself ad infinitum.
B eing John Malkovich should have ended right there,
since the filmmakers never top that hysterical sequence. Kaufman seems to have
written himself into a corner. In the last half-hour he ties things up too
neatly and the craziness--and some of the helium--goes out of the movie. Why do
crazy comedies need closure? As Cusack's character becomes more twisted, he
loses his stature (and the audience's good will), and the climax has too many
dissonances. Kaufman and Jonze end up sentimentalizing the longing for a
collective consciousness in a way I found creepy: Do they mean to be retelling
Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the body-snatchers' point of view?
(If so, the film is even darker than I think it is.)
The last part diminishes
the movie, but not enough to wreck it: It's still an amazing piece of work.
What other madcap farce would dare to have a score--it's by the superb Carter
Burwell--so plangent and melancholy? Or to cast that sunny goddess Cameron Diaz
as a nerd? The actress retains her essential sweetness, but the transformation
is otherwise remarkable: Her Lotte is such a mouth breather that she nearly
drools, and Diaz manages to look estranged from that lovely body. Even more
dazzling is Keener, an actress who has lately been stuck playing nice, sensible
women but who here is all silken curves and withering putdowns--she greets
Craig's declaration of love with a pitying sigh that brings the house down.
Keener's Maxine is so glamorously, tantalizingly self-contained that you can
almost believe she never dreams of being John Malkovich.
T
he Insider
is a big, overlong, and rather
unwieldy piece of storytelling, but the story it has to tell is so vital that
it cuts through all the dramaturgical muddiness. It's a terrific muckraking
melodrama--it will get people fuming. It's about big-business mendacity and the
lawyers who do its bidding, and about what happens to corporate whistle-blowers
in a society where the mainstream media are also in the hands of corporations.
The movie tells two interlocking stories: The first is about Jeffrey Wigand
(Russell Crowe), former vice president for research and development at the
Brown & Williamson tobacco company, who is persuaded to go public with
revelations about how cigarette manufacturers manipulate the chemicals in their
product for maximum addictiveness. (Despite their testimonies in Congress,
Wigand says, tobacco executives regard cigarettes as "a nicotine delivery
system.") The second story concerns the 60 Minutes producer Lowell
Bergman (Al Pacino), the man who persuaded Wigand to come forward. Bergman
watches in horror as his network, CBS, backs away from the story under pressure
from the corporate wing--which fears, at a time when CBS is on the block, the
impact of a major lawsuit on its value. (Oddly unmentioned in the film is that
then-owner Lawrence Tisch had his own tobacco company, Lorillard, and had
separate dealings with Brown & Williamson.)
We're used to hearing
tales of witnesses, informants, or whistle-blowers who are urged to come
forward and then, after they do, are "hung out to dry"--i.e., left unprotected
by the agents who approached and exploited them. What gives this version its
kick--and what has made it fodder for columnists for almost six months--is that
the people who betray the whistle-blower are among the most famous and powerful
journalists in America: Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt, the co-anchor and the
executive producer of 60 Minutes . If they could be pressured to "spike"
a segment that they knew to be true, the film implicitly asks, how much chance
do others have of breaking stories about corporate wrongdoing? And what about
news personnel with a financial stake in their companies? Even journalists and
editors known for their integrity tend to look the other way at their own
companies' malfeasances when they hear words like "stock options" and
"IPO."
But the movie's emotional hook isn't the CBS infighting or
Bergman's quest to get the story. It's the fate of Wigand, played by Crowe as a
prickly, blockish fellow with no social skills--an edgy wonk. Already isolated
by temperament, he seems more vulnerable than a conventionally nice martyr.
Wigand appears to have no friends, and his wife (a nearly unrecognizable Diane
Venora), a Southern debutante type who clearly didn't bargain for a life of
social and financial ostracization, is on the verge of bailing out on him even
before the bullets start appearing in the family's mailbox and the death
threats on Wigand's computer. You can't always tell what Crowe is doing--his
opacity is sometimes a little too opaque. What's plain, though, is that Wigand
doesn't want to have this role, didn't ask for it, and has no support system to
get him through it. He's entirely dependent on Bergman, with whom he mostly
communicates by cell phone and fax.
The director, Michael
Mann, has never tried to tell a story as complex (or nonviolent) as The
Insider , and he and his co-screenwriter, Eric Roth, don't shape their
narrative very satisfyingly. Wigand and Bergman are both "insiders," and both,
ultimately, whistle-blowers. (It was Bergman's spilling his guts to the New
York Times that finally shamed CBS into running the Wigand interview.) But
although the 60 Minutes producer is played by the star (Pacino
grandstands, but not to the point of distraction), Bergman's story doesn't have
the same primal force. Wigand's dark night of the soul is in a hotel, indicted,
financially ruined, threatened with death, minus his wife and daughters;
Bergman's is in an expensive-looking beach house with his warmly supportive
spouse (Lindsay Crouse).
The filmmakers seem to be bending over backward--even
now--to protect Wigand from appearing to have disclosed what he disclosed too
early. I admire their consideration for their subject, but in its wake come all
kinds of narrative fuzziness. The movie isn't clear on where the secret report
that kicked off Bergman's interest in tobacco came from, or who in the FDA
thought it was a good idea to turn him onto Wigand. It's left vague just when
Bergman decided that Wigand was important not for what he might say about that
report but about the industry as a whole. Mann must have had legal constraints
that rivaled those at 60 Minutes . The FBI, which responds to a death
threat, carries off Wigand's computer while he sputters that it contains all
his important data. The implication is that the local FBI office is in cahoots
with Brown & Williamson, but we hear no more about it; we never even know
if Wigand got his computer back. And there's no dramatic payoff with the
chillingly satanic tobacco company president (Michael Gambon) whose threats
first make Wigand think about going public. Given how many lawyers must have
vetted this thing, it's probably an achievement that Mann got as much as he did
on the screen.
Should Mike Wallace be pissed off? Depends what
really happened. In a delicious turn, Christopher Plummer makes the co-anchor
less a journalist than a pompous prima donna, but he also gives him a bullying
force and real charisma. It's not Wallace's initial caving-in to the
network--"I'm with Don on this," he tells Bergman--that does him the most
damage. It's the scene in a posh restaurant in which Wallace regards the
Wigands' paroxysms of fear over the coming 60 Minutes interview with
aristocratic contempt. He says, "Who are these people?"--which opens the
door for Bergman's too-pat rebuke: "Ordinary people under extraordinary
circumstances, Mike. What do you expect? Grace and consistency?" It's Wallace's
lack of interest in Wigand's story--the movie's most powerful--that damns him
in the audience's eyes.
The Insider
doesn't note a couple of key, maybe hopeful ironies. The first is that CBS's
"spiking" of the interview turned Wigand into an even bigger story than he
would have been otherwise. And in the "Where are they now?" titles at the end,
the filmmakers omit the most important detail of Bergman's and Wigand's current
lives: that they're being played by Al Pacino and Russell Crowe in a major
Hollywood movie, and that they're big news again.
Is there a less savory subgenre than the hardcore forensics
thriller? A corpse is discovered in a grotesque state of mutilation, then the
scene shifts to an autopsy room where skulls are popped off and innards held up
for inspection. A short time later, detectives pore over glossies of fatal
wounds. Yummy. In
The Bone Collector
, the wily serial killer
leaves clues for the brainy forensics expert, played by Denzel
Washington--clues that amount to a forensics jigsaw puzzle. If Washington
solves the puzzle fast enough, he has a shot at saving the latest manacled and
tortured victim; if not, he has to scour the gore-drenched death scene for
clues to the next murder. Yummy yummy. One fact quickly becomes apparent: "The
perp knows forensics," murmurs Washington. Yummy yummy yummy.
The rub is that Washington is a quadriplegic. He
can't "walk the grid"--he needs a pair of eyes as sensitive as his but attached
to a good pair of legs. As luck would have it, they're attached to a very good
pair of legs and a great pair of breasts. Angelina Jolie plays the cop who
discovers a body and snaps some photos that convince Washington she has a
"gift" for forensics. He dispatches his new protégé to grisly crime scenes,
purring into her headphones and demanding to know what she sees. Better than
phone sex! He says, "I want to know what you feel in the deepest recesses of
your senses," and "Follow the instincts you were born with. ... Process the
body." I was thinking that she could process my body anytime, but Jolie rises
above such adolescent spasms. Well, almost. She's a thoughtful actress, but she
wasn't born to play a beat cop. Those tire-tread lips are model lips; those
exquisitely chiseled cheekbones, model cheekbones. Washington scans her file on
his fancy bedside computer: Guess what? She was a teen-age model! Clever
save!
The Bone Collector is less rancid than the
last big serial-killer-fetishist picture, Copycat (1995), and it's
expertly shot and edited. Phillip Noyce, the director, and Dean Semler, the
cinematographer, cook up some eerily muzzy images inside the brackish tunnels
and abandoned warehouses where the fiend does his/her demented surgery. But the
film is still a piece of exploitive schlock. A mediocre mystery, too: It never
approaches the ingenuity of Thomas Harris, still the maestro of forensic porn.
For some reason, Noyce telegraphs the identity of the killer halfway through
(does he mean to? Or does the hammy framing give it away by accident?), but
it's left to the laughably garish climax for the wacko to spell out his/her
arbitrary motive. (The killer's lines are on the level of: "You think I'm
m-m-mad, don't you?") The only aspect of The Bone Collector that can't
be derided is Washington. The option of walking through the part clearly not
available to him, he doesn't sleep through it either: Every muscle in this
man's ruined body seems to strain against his fate while the wheels in his
brain grind fiercely. He deserves a smarter psycho--a smarter movie, too.
