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Like the last Jonze-Kaufman collaboration, this film is a mind-spinning
and often hilarious examination of identity and connection, playing
with the whole idea of cinema in such a way that it keeps us
delightfully off balance. Filming is underway on Being John Malkovich,
the first screenplay by Charlie Kaufman (Cage). He's still an insecure
writer, so when a film exec (Swinton) asks him to adapt the bestselling
book The Orchid Thief by New Yorker writer Susan Orlean (Streep), he
feels deeply inadequate. And he's even more irritated by his identical
twin brother Donald's cliche-ridden attempts to write his own
screenplay. As Charlie gets deeper into the project, he feels less and
less able to capture the book's subtle nuances, wondering what really
went on between Orlean and her subject, the orchid poacher Laroche
(Cooper).
This makes it sound like such a simple film, but it's anything but. This
is a film within a novel within a film within another film, and yet as
it bounced back and forth between different layers of fact and fiction,
it touches on some amazingly thoughtful themes about love and
self-respect. And it's absolutely hilarious as well--especially for
film lovers who will spot all kinds of brilliant jabs and wry references
that make the whole thing spring marvelously to life. Jonze's direction
is sharp and wickedly funny, expertly edited to carry us through the
multi-layered story and all the various asides.
The cast is nearly perfect. Streep nails her character so perfectly that
she seems to not be acting at all; the Orlean character here is a real
dark horse, with all kinds of unexpected elements to her just waiting
to come out. Meanwhile, Cage gives one of his rare raw, selfless
performances (two of them, actually)--pudgy, frumpy and frazzled, yet
knowingly comic and surprisingly sympathetic. By putting himself in the
story (and creating a fictional twin), Kaufman makes this into a sequel
of sorts for Being John Malkovich, picking up on the same themes and
running even further with them. On the surface it's about the nature of
writing and creativity, the constraints of the business, and how
commercial concerns seductively invade art. But it's also a film about
pure passion on several levels, and how love of others and ourselves
helps us adapt to our surroundings.
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