A version of this review appeared in The Age, June 8, 2006.
A straightforward enough jape on the one hand, Colour Me Kubrick is also a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma – all three summed up in the perplexing person of John Malkovich, who gives perhaps his most flamboyant comic performance to date as Alan Conway, a real-life London swindler who came to brief notoriety in the 1990s through his serial impersonation of the legendary (and rarely photographed) auteur Stanley Kubrick.
Extravagantly camp, always on the lookout for free drinks or ready cash, the Conway of the film is both an unforgettable character and a blank slate – a compulsive if talentless performer who uses Kubrick's privileged reputation for eccentricity to license his own bizarre affectations.
In turn, this conception of the role allows Malkovich to give a masterclass in "bad" acting, whether he's exaggerating his familiar reedy tones into those of a petulant old queen, playing a back-slapping Yank as if reading from a script written wholly in capital letters, or feigning madness with the aid of a Beethoven hairdo and contorted poses out of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919).
If the historical Conway is unknowable, his role model looms at the other end of this hall of mirrors as an equally shadowy opposite number – though Anthony Frewin and Brian Cook, who serve here as writer and director respectively, were among Kubrick's most loyal professional associates up till his death.
In this light, Colour Me Kubrick can be seen as a presumably friendly jab at a former employer's grand artistic ambitions. Though neither the actual Kubrick nor his works appear directly onscreen, the film manages to burlesque Spartacus (1960) and reposition many of the Master's most celebrated soundtrack selections for maximum bathos.
An American based in England for much of his career, Kubrick remained an artist in self-imposed exile, whose later super-productions were essentially stateless. In the movie, Conway makes the most of this cultural gap, dropping Hollywood names at every opportunity and luring his glamour-starved victims with the offer of a passport to the promised land of showbiz.
As if to redress the balance, Frewin's studiously lowbrow screenplay stems from a truly indigenous cinematic tradition. "I used to handle myself," Conway murmurs archly, referring to one protégé's need for an agent. With lines like that, the film might as well have been titled Carry On Kubrick; perhaps someone feared the point would get lost in translation.
Such homely jokes feel as timelessly British as the artfully seedy locations selected by Cook, from the half-deserted gay pubs where Conway scouts for pick-ups to the seaside hotel where he forms part of the entourage of the aptly-named lounge singer Lee Pratt (played with some pathos by Jim Davidson).
New heights of reflexivity are scaled when Conway announces his next project as a science-fiction epic to star...John Malkovich. Ironically, Malkovich in this all-out grotesque mode would have made an ideal Kubrick performer, as Cook and Frewin surely appreciate.
Indeed, I've fantasised in the past about an alternate-universe version of Lolita (1962) which would star Malkovich either as the paedophile anti-hero Humbert Humbert or as Clare Quilty, Humbert's own shape-shifting doppleganger. Failing this possibility, for fans of the foppish Malkovich persona Colour Me Kubrick is a delightful one-man-show.
Extravagantly camp, always on the lookout for free drinks or ready cash, the Conway of the film is both an unforgettable character and a blank slate – a compulsive if talentless performer who uses Kubrick's privileged reputation for eccentricity to license his own bizarre affectations.
In turn, this conception of the role allows Malkovich to give a masterclass in "bad" acting, whether he's exaggerating his familiar reedy tones into those of a petulant old queen, playing a back-slapping Yank as if reading from a script written wholly in capital letters, or feigning madness with the aid of a Beethoven hairdo and contorted poses out of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919).
If the historical Conway is unknowable, his role model looms at the other end of this hall of mirrors as an equally shadowy opposite number – though Anthony Frewin and Brian Cook, who serve here as writer and director respectively, were among Kubrick's most loyal professional associates up till his death.
In this light, Colour Me Kubrick can be seen as a presumably friendly jab at a former employer's grand artistic ambitions. Though neither the actual Kubrick nor his works appear directly onscreen, the film manages to burlesque Spartacus (1960) and reposition many of the Master's most celebrated soundtrack selections for maximum bathos.
An American based in England for much of his career, Kubrick remained an artist in self-imposed exile, whose later super-productions were essentially stateless. In the movie, Conway makes the most of this cultural gap, dropping Hollywood names at every opportunity and luring his glamour-starved victims with the offer of a passport to the promised land of showbiz.
As if to redress the balance, Frewin's studiously lowbrow screenplay stems from a truly indigenous cinematic tradition. "I used to handle myself," Conway murmurs archly, referring to one protégé's need for an agent. With lines like that, the film might as well have been titled Carry On Kubrick; perhaps someone feared the point would get lost in translation.
Such homely jokes feel as timelessly British as the artfully seedy locations selected by Cook, from the half-deserted gay pubs where Conway scouts for pick-ups to the seaside hotel where he forms part of the entourage of the aptly-named lounge singer Lee Pratt (played with some pathos by Jim Davidson).
New heights of reflexivity are scaled when Conway announces his next project as a science-fiction epic to star...John Malkovich. Ironically, Malkovich in this all-out grotesque mode would have made an ideal Kubrick performer, as Cook and Frewin surely appreciate.
Indeed, I've fantasised in the past about an alternate-universe version of Lolita (1962) which would star Malkovich either as the paedophile anti-hero Humbert Humbert or as Clare Quilty, Humbert's own shape-shifting doppleganger. Failing this possibility, for fans of the foppish Malkovich persona Colour Me Kubrick is a delightful one-man-show.
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