For sheer audacity and outrageous invention, you can do no better than the truly extraordinary "Being John Malkovich," a bizarre, involving, strangely moving film experience. Putting it plainly, it is unlike anything I have ever seen before.
John Cusack stars as a long-haired puppeteer named Craig Schwartz, an expressive, magical talent who performs his act on the streets. Most of his puppet shows contain sexual connotations, and thus are not always embraced by passerby. He lives at home with his animal-loving wife, Lotte (an unrecognizable Cameron Diaz), but the marriage is unexciting and their conversations do not merit much communication. When Craig is not performing, he sleeps most of the day until he gets the energy to look for a job. This leads him to an office vicinity located in the 7 1/2th floor of a Manhattan building (one has to crawl in between floors to get in) where he works as a fast file clerk. It is here where he discovers a mysterious portal that leads into the mind of John Malkovich!
The portal changes Craig's life, as well as Lotte's (who forms a sexual awakening). Along for the ride is Craig's co-worker. a sexpot vixen (cunningly played by Catherine Keener) whom Craig is attracted to. To say much more is to ruin the fun of "Being John Malkovich," which takes its central idea through all kinds of delirious heights and lengths with one inventive twist after another. We are talking sexual connotations galore, celebrities, parentage, a one-hundred-year-old office manager, chimps, wooden puppets, a bald-headed Charlie Sheen and, of course, John Malkovich.
Cusack's Craig is the perfect foible for this type of bizarre fantasy - the Everyman as the malcontent artist trying to make a name for himself any which way he can. We are led every step of the way of his unusual circumstance, and slowly the subjective stance of his character shifts to Lotte, back to Cusack and Keener, and Malkovich. This leads to an interesting question: whose life is it anyway? Anyone can live inside Malkovich's mind briefly before being deported hilariously into the New Jersey Turnpike, but when can a mind not be your own? Craig uses this portal as a portal into his own alternate existence, and the film grows more complex and darkly comic as Craig's ambitions grow.
Cameron Diaz is astoundingly good, and proves she is a fine character actress - look how well she disappears into the role of the sexually carnivirous Lotte. This is clearly her finest work since the comic powerhouse of "There's Something About Mary." Catherine Keener gives an acutely observant performance - her best scenes are when she tries to woo Malkovich (in and out of his brain) or when she seduces Charles and Lotte in their apartment. Malkovich is as always Malkovich, an elegantly stylish actor - he seems like the right actor for this kind of mind trip, though the running joke in the film is that most of the characters can't recall what films he has appeared in.
"Being John Malkovich" is directed by music-video director Spike Jonze, who often relies a bit too much on hand-held camerawork, but nevertheless has an efficient, straightforward style. Writer Charlie Kaufman must have had a wonderful time concocting all the different paradoxes and twists with such a novel idea - he runs with it and takes it from one extreme to another. It is not so much about being someone else as it is about losing your soul in the process. This is the first film I would literally call a mind trip of the first order.
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