Why Three Kings ranks among Spike Jonze’s best work

In an alter­nate real­i­ty, Spike Jonze is prepar­ing for Zoolan­der 3, did one of Woody Allen’s Euro­pean movies (a good one), and has an Oscar for play­ing Joel in Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind. Okay, maybe that’s an exag­ger­a­tion, but the fact remains: Spike Jonze is a great comedic actor. Sure, he’s also a wide­ly acclaimed direc­tor, News­night pre­sen­ter Emi­ly Maitlis’ sworn neme­sis and the cre­ator of many icon­ic music pro­mos. To me, how­ev­er, his sweet hick in David O Russell’s 1999 fea­ture, Three Kings, is a stand­out per­for­mance in a movie that’s full of them.

“Dang didn’t think I’d see any­one get shot in this war.” That’s Con­rad Vig’s reac­tion to a dying Iraqi sol­dier, shot by Troy Bar­lowe (Mark Wahlberg). Vig is a Reservist, and the fourth king of the movie, the one that got left out of the title. Guess that would make him d’Artagnan? Before he was shipped out to lib­er­ate Kuwait, he spent time shoot­ing things up in his back­yard. Dur­ing the Gulf War, and its after­math, when the movie takes place, he is a pas­sen­ger, moved by the actions of oth­er char­ac­ters. Played by Jonze, Vig is a lot of things: yokel, the younger broth­er, the howl­ing voice of O’Russell’s blue col­lar Mid­dle America.

Jonze is also the Acad­e­my Award win­ning direc­tor of Adap­ta­tion., Where the Wild Things Are and Her, and a direc­tor whose pub­lic per­sona is the embod­i­ment of ten­der­ness. But in 2001, he was still a young upstart, in the process of wrap­ping up his own first fea­ture, Being John Malkovich, when his friend David O Rus­sell offered him a sup­port­ing role in his new film.

Vig is a char­ac­ter who remains in a state of com­plete bewil­der­ment through­out the entire movie, and there­fore has the best, and most appro­pri­ate lines. ​‘Like a car­toon, it’s fuck­ing crazy,’ is his response to a recent­ly blown up cow. ​‘That’s dumb, it should be the oth­er way around,’ he retorts when George Clooney’s Archie Gates tells him that courage to do things comes after you’ve done them.

He’s the kid in the equa­tion, fol­low­ing the oth­ers around and get­ting into trou­ble. Bar­lowe and Vig’s rela­tion­ship is the sweet­est thing about a most­ly cyn­i­cal movie, the for­mer con­stant­ly apol­o­gis­ing for the latter’s igno­rance. Jonze’s slight stature and nasal­ly voice give Con­rad a Bugs Bun­ny qual­i­ty: his actions are reflex­es, guid­ed by basic instincts. He’s an Amer­i­can on a vaca­tion that just hap­pens to include guns and Sad­dam Hus­sein. It’s a satir­i­cal char­ac­ter, and Jonze embraces the absur­di­ty, play­ing him with his mouth open, quizzi­cal expres­sion on face, but nev­er los­ing that shot of humanity.

If you watch the Behind the Scenes fea­turette includ­ed on the DVD, Jonze not only keeps up his accent off-cam­era, he seems to stay com­plete­ly in char­ac­ter. ​‘We got a lot of shit blown up, def­i­nite­ly. There’s a ton of explo­sions that we have to deal with and I don’t know, there’s good ones too, and they’re crazy,’ is a line Con­rad Vig would say if he was in an action film. Accord­ing to O Rus­sell, Jonze, ​‘just enjoyed fuck­ing around. For him, it was like rid­ing a BMX bike off a ramp to see what it was like to act in a movie’. That comes across in the film, and O Rus­sell delib­er­ate­ly keeps the heavy stuff away from him, feed­ing it in lit­tle bits at a time, and Jonze deals with it admirably, if a lit­tle awkwardly.

One of the rea­sons that Jonze’s per­for­mance has aged well is that it is still his only major role. He didn’t act in fea­tures again for a long time, and nowa­days, he some­times does bit parts in pres­tige fare, like Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street or Ben­nett Miller’s Mon­ey­ball or his pal’s Jon­ny Knoxville’s Jack­ass series. It didn’t have to be that way though. Accord­ing to O Rus­sell, dur­ing Three Kings, the stu­dio was already think­ing of him as a poten­tial future star. But the absence of oth­er roles works in Jonze’s favour, because the lim­it­ed sam­ple stands alone as a pris­tine showcase.

In Three Kings, he got that rare role for a non-actor: removed from his actu­al per­sona, ful­ly thought-out, and con­struct­ed in a man­ner that is aware of his limitations.