Malkovich on the make
Color Me Kubrick
Directed by Brian W. Cook
As Stanley Kubrick’s assistant and his longtime assistant director, respectively, screenwriter Anthony Frewin and director Brian W. Cook must naturally have been curious about the strange case of the aptly named Alan Conway, a con man who sloppily impersonated Kubrick during the last years of the famed filmmaker’s life.
Color Me Kubrick is their account of Conway’s exploits, and it’s as cold and confidently improvisational as, apparently, Conway himself. In that role, John Malkovich at once draws on and plays off his Being John Malkovich insider/outsider enigma status, his Dangerous Liaisons seductive mystique, and the tasteful-criminal afterglow of his Mr. Ripley and his Jake in Object of Beauty. He depicts the thoroughbred bar- and bed-hopping bilker with a pushy hamminess. But it seems possible, even likely, that the approach, in this case, is a sort of meta method acting, as appropriate an attack on the part as any. Who knows, really? Conway’s hideous papier mâché of accents pasted over an in-your-face swishy sexuality doesn’t seem to have a core. Even when he is groveling and confessing before a young stud he picked up in Marseille—in the guise of Kubrick, of course—Malkovich’s Conway looks up at the fellow in a quick but definitive appraisal of the performance’s effect. Was the real Conway, if there could hermeneutically be such a thing, ever any more real?
Conway mucks up the lives of sexual and monetary conquests, and takes shameful if picaresque advantage of a hotel-circuit singer-comedian. But eventually, a run-in with the New York Times columnist Frank Rich, of all people, ends the charade, and Conway gets the notoriety as Conway that he so long craved and cashed in on as Kubrick. The narrative reflex, of course, is to see this as the ironic comeuppance, since it seems to push him over the edge. Aha—be careful what you wish for, we think. Fame's not all it's cracked up to be. But, aha—be careful of moviegoer voyeuristic smugness, too, because Conway's cons aren’t over even if the Kubrick bit has played out.
If you’re in a philosophical mood, you might appreciate the parallels and contrasts between Conway and Kubrick, both strong-willed, determined, highly idiosyncratic craftsmen who simultaneously abhorred and skillfully gamed their respective systems—gullible hangers on in one case, and the entertainment industry in the other. Such associations are encouraged by musical and visual quotes from Kubrick's movies, particularly 2001 and A Clockwork Orange. A Thus Spake Zarathustra moment in the laundromat is actually quite poignant, perhaps because it highlights the grand, bittersweet weirdness of the everyday, as encapsulated in Malkovich's full embrace of an empty character.
But the artist/con-artist comparisons aren't, ultimately, too enlightening, since Kubrick was an inspired, compulsive control freak and Conway, at least as suggested here, an uninspired, reckless drunken pleasure seeker in control of nothing, and lucky, moreover, that he wasn’t beaten to death by the more thuggish of his vengeful dupes.
From baseline affected fey Englishman, Malkovich’s accents range from an all-American baritone, something like Jim Carrey in underjaw-thrusting put-on mode, to an iffy Brooklyn whine. Conway’s pickup lines are as awful as his accents. “I used to handle myself,” he says riffing on having an agent as he seduces a gullible designer, “but now I prefer letting someone else do it.” And that lad, typical of Conway’s companions, isn’t much more subtle: “They do say in Hollywood the only way to the top is through the bottom.” Stunningly, Conway isn’t even particularly knowledgeable about Kubrick, to whom he attributes Judgment at Nuremberg when trying to woo a guy in a pool hall who, alas, knows his Stanley Kramer films.
Add to that Conway’s outrageous outfits by costumer Victoria Russell—a haphazard Cage Aux Droll—and it’s all as sad as it is provocative. “I’m not Stanley Kubrick,” a deflated Conway wails to the young buck from Marseille. “I’m Alan Conway, one of life’s great failures.”
But you can’t quite shrug the story off, either, because Conway's such a consistent success as a failure. There are some tantalizing hints of worlds within worlds in Malkovich’s take. To a pharmacist and his wife (the pharmacist apparently also manages a rock band; everyone we meet here is on the make in one way or another), Conway, pretending to be Kubrick under the assumed identity of Conway and living in a dive above an adult bookstore, explains:
I suppose at times I grow quite disgusted with the razzle-dazzle noise and glitz of showbiz. And at times I must concentrate on what is truly important in my life—my work. And I must be undisturbed. This is my hide-away, my space for inner tranquility.
It’s a weirdly compelling moment, because it describes a full-time con man’s work as well as it might a movie mogul’s. That and the brief flights of elation among the poor sods Conway exploits when they think they’re in the presence of greatness hint at the manic-depressive quality of society’s star swooning. "I'm not the man you think I am," sings Bryan Adams in what amounts to the film's theme song, "but I'm the man for you."
Still, the smatterings of insight are undermined by the picture’s self-satisfied insidery ribbing. For instance, Malkovich, as Conway, talks about casting Malkovich in a film (3001: A Space Odyssey). Moreover, while Conway says that he only wishes to escape himself, that's in his speech to the Marseille conquest and evidently just ruse too, and nowhere in the film do we spy a true self from which Conway might bust out.
The story’s profundity is perhaps lodged in this film somewhere. But it’s trapped and helpless, raising the question what a director as inventive as Kubrick himself might have done to extract it.
-A.C.K.
