There will never be another Stanley Kubrick movie – the great filmmaker died in 1999 – so “Color Me Kubrick” will have to serve as a pleasant morsel for starved Kubrick fans.
And, in fact, the ghost of Stanley K. hovers over this film in a couple of ways. It was actually his idea and, as such, it’s a morbid little chuckle from beyond the grave.
The film is based on a true, if bizarre, story. In the late 1990s, an impostor went around London pretending to be Stanley Kubrick. This man, Alan Conway, would use his celebrity status to get drinks, money and sometimes sex from unsuspecting dupes. It was an easy scam, because the reclusive Kubrick, although famous, was rarely photographed.
Apparently Kubrick himself told a personal assistant, Anthony Frewin, to try writing a screenplay out of the affair. (Frewin had been fielding calls from bewildered people wondering how to get hold of their new “friend” the film director.) And that’s how Frewin wrote “Color Me Kubrick.”
The movie is fun on a number of levels, but the main draw is the bravura performance by John Malkovich as Conway/”Kubrick.” Malkovich, who in recent years has seemed bored by acting or only interested in camping up, appears to be having a ball in this role.
His Conway is a gaseous, slithering faker with atrocious fashion sense. He sometimes speaks in a fey lisp, sometimes in a honking Bronx drawl. Malkovich’s costumes are a hoot – Conway might be attired in a tattered skirt over trousers, or perhaps a dirty raincoat and ball cap – and it’s somehow appropriate that they were selected by Victoria Russell, daughter of the flamboyant filmmaker Ken Russell.
In short, Malkovich is a great actor playing a bad actor. This could be the most sheerly enjoyable performance in movies this year.
The film itself comes together as a chockablock series of sequences, showing how Conway uncorked his schemes. The longest involves a gay entertainer (British comedian Jim Davidson) who believes that Stanley Kubrick is going to help him gain a foothold in Las Vegas. Conway gets a free weekend at a lavish resort hotel out of it.
Director Brian Cook was an assistant director to Kubrick on three films, so he’s entitled to parody the master in a few scenes; for instance, “Color Me” opens with a spoof of “A Clockwork Orange.” This is fun for Kubrick fans, without being distracting from the main story.
And that story scores a point that Kubrick would have enjoyed: that a con man only succeeds because of the complicity of the suckers. Conway doesn’t even have to try very hard – he gets Kubrick trivia wrong – but the people around him are more than happy to surrender common sense for a brush with celebrity.
John Malkovich shines in “Color Me Kubrick.”
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