Color Me Kubrick

John Malkovich gives it his all in the moderately funny yet altogether forgettable comedy Color Me Kubrick, but the film’s lackluster script and sloppy narrative devices make it pretty much useless despite Malkovich’s best efforts. The story focuses on the strange tale of con man Alan Conway who during a brief stint around the time Stanley Kubrick was filming Eyes Wide Shut in 1998 impersonated the world renowned director in a series of embarrassing circumstances. Conway more or less preyed on the willingness of desperate artists and sycophantic elitists to believe that they’d found themselves in the company of greatness. He’d often ramble on, telling invented anecdotes about on set happenings while shooting some of his most famous films or describe his ever changing “next project.” One of his most successful confidence games promised financial backing or artistic exposure to London’s desperate would-be writers, actors, and rockers before eventually slipping out of their lives for good.

There’s no doubt that it’s an interesting story with the potential to become a quirky, strange docudrama. This just isn’t that splendid a realization. It sticks to stale, contrived, vignettes depicting bizarre, loopy and only sometimes a little bit funny encounters between Conway and his many pawns. The games get tired really fast, though, and Malkovich can only make Conway’s frantic whining stretch so far. The only moments in the film where we get close to unearthing some motivation for his strange behavior comes during a scene in which Conway falls to pieces before literally crawling on his hands and knees to beg forgiveness. It’s obnoxious and unenlightening. I really wanted the film to at least toy at some of the potentially richer complications of Conway’s behavior or even get off the same one note routine (Conway meets pawn-Conway befriends pawn-pawn makes fool of self-Conway departs). By the end we’ve been through nearly a dozen victims of Conway’s charade but never given any more than a few funny throwaway punchlines and some mildly entertaining antics. It’s pointless to tell this kind of story without some greater narrative structure grounding us in Conway’s twisted perspective or even the perspective of the New York Times reporters who went on to reveal his scam (this whole key story gets mostly shuffled off-screen save for some incredibly awkward direct address tidbits that break the film’s already thin believability). It’s attempting to be a brisk, blithe, funny trifle and it maybe succeeds at times. Mostly, though, you’ll be bored and craving something a bit more diverse, complicated, or even just satisfyingly simple in a way that this empty stupid film will never achieve.

Grade: C-