Being John Malkovich

Unemployed puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) and animal lover Lotte Schwartz (Cameron Diaz) are in a loveless marriage. Craig gets a job on the low ceiling 7½ floor of a Manhattan office building. He falls for alluring fellow worker Maxine Lund (Catherine Keener) who doesn't return the feelings. He finds a doorway in his office that leads into the mind of John Malkovich. After 15 minutes, the person is ejected into a ditch on the New Jersey Turnpike. Maxine decides to sell tickets at $200 a pop. Lotte is completely changed by the experience and thinks she's a transsexual. Craig's boss Dr. Lester is obsessed with Malkovich.

This is one of the strangest and most compelling ideas ever put on the screen written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. It is exciting that everything and everyone is a little off in this movie. Cameron Diaz is ugly. John Cusack is disheveled. Catherine Keener is a sex goddess. The whole movie is off its axis and so much the better for it. It's so weird that it's a lot of fun.

I give my nine points for originality and the quality of production though, not the likeability of the characters. John Cusack and Cameron Diaz play Craig and Lotte Schwartz, a married couple that are going through the motions and don't seem to realize it. Cameron Diaz is made up to be so dowdy looking that she is initially not even recognizable. They live in a basement apartment crowded with animals (Lotte is an animal lover who works at a pet shop). Craig is a puppeteer who cannot find work in his chosen field and even gets beat up on the street for staging what one beefy dad thinks is a sacrilegious puppet show.

At the suggestion of his wife, Craig goes looking for a regular job, and due to his fast hands he gets a job as a file clerk at LesterCorp. There he meets Maxine, a pretty but sociopathic young woman who, fortunately for society, seems to have no violent impulses, because if she did believe me she would follow them. Craig falls for her. Lotte falls for her. And they both make a play for her simultaneously when she comes over for dinner one night. She rejects them both.

Maxine made it clear from the beginning she considered Craig a pathetic loser, but she needs him to exploit something that Craig discovered - a door that leads to a portal in which anybody who enters gets to "become" John Malkovich for fifteen minutes. At the end of the fifteen minutes the person is spit out on the side of the road at the entry to the New Jersey Turnpike. As a team they reopen Lestercorp at night and charge people 200 dollars apiece to "become John Malkovich". Neither of them knows what this portal is doing there behind a file cabinet and why it leads to Malkovich, but they initially don't care past its monetary value.

It is part drama, part comedy, and even part horror and completely weird. And what the portal is doing there is all wrapped up in Dr. Lester, owner of Lestercorp, who is the only likeable character in the film, and even he has more than a bit of a Dr. Frankenstein/God complex.

Also featuring Mary Kay Place as the object of Dr. Lester's lust who has convinced him he has a terrible speech impediment - he does not, John Malkovich as himself, and Charlie Sheen as himself and Malkovich's friend. It is great seeing Charlie Sheen when he was still healthy.

Very highly recommended. But the plot is so weird you just have to let go of your reason and go with it.

This has been a great year for alternate realities at the movies. Films like The Matrix, Sixth Sense, Blair Witch Project, Thirteenth Floor, and Run, Lola, Run have all, in different ways, played with the line that separates past from present, reality from simulation, and truth from fiction. Being John Malkovich can be added to this list of innovative films that a recent issue of Entertainment Weekly described as the first films of the 21st century.

There is little in this film that is formula. John Cusack plays a gifted puppeteer who aspires to be one of the world's great puppeteers. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of job openings for puppeteers so he is reduced to street theater where he is clearly underappreciated. An almost unrecognizable Cameron Diaz plays Cusack's wife, a pet lover who is just a little quirky. When Cusack decides to take a job as a file clerk on floor 7.5 of an office building, life becomes even weirder. Cusack discovers an opening behind a file cabinet, a little door that leads into a tunnel. Like the characters in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, (or Alice Through the Looking Glass), Cusack jumps in and finds himself in an alternative universe. Instead of Narnia or Wonderland, Cusack finds himself on a 15-minute ride inside actor John Malkovich (played quite capably by . . . John Malkovich).

Cusack joins forces with a co-worker to create a business. For $200 people can spend 15 minutes inside of John Malkovich's head, seeing the world through his eyes. Since this is even better than Real World or a WebCam show, people come in droves. Eventually, Malkovich himself discovers what's going on and jumps the line to go inside of his own mind. This leads to what has to be one of the more unique scenes in the history of film. The story takes on an even more interesting twist when Cusack finds a unique way to fulfill his lifelong dream of being the world's greatest puppeteer.

This is one weird film--and I've left out some of the weird. This is also one of the most creative films I have seen, and the film raises interesting questions about consciousness, identity, love and meaning. There are great performances here by Cusack, Diaz, Malkovich, and Catherine Keener (Cusack's co-worker and eventual love interest). The real star of the show, however, is the story itself. First-time screenwriter Charlie Kaufman has crafted an interesting and innovative story. First-time director Spike Jonze handles the material extremely well. This is clearly not a film for all tastes, and the language and sexual scenes may well offend. This is, however, something that is very rare, in Hollywood--innovative, creative, and thought provoking. Watch for this film during the Oscar nominations. If this doesn't get nominated for screenplay--at least--I will hang up my trophy.

This film is excellently made and based on an imaginative, intelligent and wacky script: a depressive puppeteer discovers by chance a mysterious portal in his five-foot tall office located on the 7,5th floor of a Manhattan office building, leading within the head of the movie star John Malkovich. The cast is excellent and the actors co-exist in perfect symbiosis, literally as well as figuratively. The quintet John Cusack + Cameron Diaz + Orson Bean + Catherine Keener + John Malkovich is awesome.

A not exhaustive list of my favorite quotes: Meet you in Malkovich in one hour. The truth is for suckers, Johnny boy. Let's have sex on his table and then make him eat an omelette off of it. I comes before U. You don't know how lucky you are being a monkey, because consciousness is a terrible curse. There is truth, and there are lies, and art always tells the truth, even when it's lying. She's got her doctorate in speech impedimentology from Case Western. It's the idea of being inside someone else's skin and seeing what they see and feeling what they feel.

... but without it you'd be unconscious or you wouldn't be you, or are you, you? Exploring identity, appearance, choice and fame in the most original and entertaining of ways, this esoterically amusing vision of what makes us who we are manages to keep you engaged and amused while encouraging a little self reflection upon completion - that is if it is you doing the reflecting, pulling your own strings, grinding your own organ, dancing to your own tune.