John Malkovich's deliberate drawl can make refinement sound threatening. We rate him most highly when his precise delivery serves dark comedy, and when a film gives us more to watch than a familiar sinister presence.
Fi1m perspective
In Being John Malkovich (1999), Malkovich lets us see how humiliating it is to have other people interfere with his life. He does not protect the version of himself on screen from looking ridiculous. He does give the man enough dignity for the ridicule to hurt. We value that willingness to be put at a disadvantage in an actor whose reedy drawl and deliberate cadence so often suggest control. The familiar voice has more to do than make somebody sound dangerous.
His early film work runs from Mr. Will in Places in the Heart (1984) to the Vicomte de Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons (1988). The latter helped establish the refined, morally dubious presence that later roles would repeatedly call upon. Mitch Leary, the calculating assassin in In the Line of Fire (1993), and Cyrus Grissom in Con Air (1997) belong to that subsequent run of sinister parts. There is a limitation here: menace can become something a film expects him to supply simply by turning up. We prefer it when the writing gives that controlled voice something more particular to do.
Director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman provide that opportunity in Being John Malkovich, treating the borrowing of an actor's identity with a straight face. Malkovich takes the interference seriously rather than inviting us to congratulate him for joining in. We were embarrassed by our own laughter, because his visible indignity makes the other characters' wish to escape themselves look cruel. The film sometimes lets its ingenious plotting hurry past the characters' feelings. His performance keeps us interested in what this arrangement does to a person, even when the screenplay is busy finding the next complication.
The Coen brothers' Burn After Reading (2008), in which he plays Osborne Cox, offers another use for his comic timing. That is a direction we would welcome more of, rather than another part built chiefly around how unsettling he can sound. Start with Being John Malkovich for an actor willing to make himself ridiculous without letting us forget that being laughed at can hurt.
Biography
John Gavin Malkovich (born 9 December 1953) is an American actor. He began his career as a charter member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago in 1976. He moved to New York, where he appeared in a Steppenwolf production of Sam Shepard's True West (1982) and made his Broadway debut as Biff in the 1984 revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
Malkovich received Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor for Places in the Heart (1984) and In the Line of Fire (1993). His other film roles include The Killing Fields (1984), Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Con Air (1997), Being John Malkovich (1999), Burn After Reading (2008) and Red (2010). For television, he won a Primetime Emmy Award for his performance in the 1985 adaptation of Death of a Salesman.
