Viral Malkovich

There were multiple John Malkovichs in the 1999 comedy that bears his name. He has been hard to pin down ever since, veering from Hollywood junk (Eragon) to high-art pictures, fashion spreads, and the occasional noteworthy credit, like Ripley's Game, from 2002, the same year he made an intriguing directorial debut with The Dancer Upstairs. In Colour Me Kubrick...A True-ish Story, the actor has gone viral, a non-fatal but highly communicable disease infecting gullible Londoners. Malkovich plays Alan Conway, in a loose account of the con man's highly successful masquerade as the reclusive director Stanley Kubrick during the years-long filming of 1999's Eyes Wide Shut.

The British-born Conway neither looked nor sounded anything like the bearded, Bronx-bred Kubrick, and knew little about his career; according to accounts of his spree, the only Kubrick film he had seen was Lolita, and that for only ten minutes. But he knew enough about the nature of celebrity to know that pretending to be one would be enough for him to cadge booze, money, and sex from his marks, all caught up in the delusion that "Stanley" would make them costume designers, rock stars, or Vegas lounge acts, whatever their fantasy job was. They were too embarrassed to prosecute, and Conway, shuffled off to a posh loony bin in the screen story, died a free man in 1998, just three months before Kubrick passed away.

Playing Conway, Malkovich starts off somewhere in a stratosphere of high gay camp, and by the end of the film has reached his own stargate, a la 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dressed and coiffed like a transvestite, in short pink pants and silk shirts with lizard imprints, the actor adopts a new and more bizarre accent for each successive deception, which is pretty much all that the film is (that, and allusions to Spartacus, 2001, and A Clockwork Orange). The director, Brian W. Cook, and the screenwriter, Anthony Frewin, both associates of the real Kubrick, would have us believe that the more ridiculous Conway became, the easier it was for the swindled to believe that he was the Olympian director, who lived on his own unique plain, if not the gay fantasia Conway envisioned for himself. Maybe.

But I suspect they fell hard for the comic Malkovich who emerged from Being John Malkovich, and let the performer, who has an affinity for rogues, fool them into more and more improbable masquerades within the Kubrick persona. Recognizable performers like Honor Blackman, Robert Powell, and William Hootkins and Marisa Berenson (playing New York Times writers Frank Rich and Alex Witchel, who were caught up in Conway's act) flit in and out of the picture for a scene or two, but Colour Me Kubrick is basically a star turn overwhelmed by its star. The only real tension, and smoothly shaped scene, is a break from the funny freeloading, when a film buff calls Conway on his pretending. I doubt Kubrick would ever have countenanced such a slapdash goof, a true-ish story that is long-ish at 86 minutes, even if Malkovich does provide an irresistible sugar rush at first.

Colour Me Kubrick is out on DVD today. It opened in a few theaters on Friday, the same day it premiered on HDNet Movies, which is where I saw it, in a nice hi-def transfer that preserves every lurid hue in Conway's clothing. With so many ways to see the film its U.S. distributor, Magnolia Pictures, clearly intends for it to be catching.