BEING JOHN MALKOVICH
Starring John Cusack, Cameron Diaz and John Malkovich. Directed by Spike Jonze. Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman. Running time: 112 minutes. Rating: R. At the Lincoln Square, the 72nd St. East, the Kips Bay and the Chelsea Cinemas.
THERE’S a temptation to describe “Being John Malkovich” as the best episode of “The Twilight Zone” never made – but that doesn’t begin to do justice to the year’s smartest, most stunningly original movie.
In an era when most movies are depressingly alike and can be summarized in one sentence, “Being John Malkovich” defies such easy description. The best advice I can give you is to stop reading now, get yourself to a theater and revel in the nonstop surprises director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman have up their sleeves.
John Cusack plays Craig Schwartz, an unemployed street puppeteer who’s ready to hang up his strings after being punched out during a suggestive performance of “Tristan and Isolde.”
He takes a job filing records downtown on the 7th floor of the Merton-Flemmer building, where the ceilings and overhead are very low (as explained in one of two hysterically funny mock documentaries within the film).
Craig’s boss, the mysterious Dr. Lester (Orson Bean) claims to be 105 years old and mistakenly thinks he has a speech impediment – though the problem is with his ditzy secretary (Mary Kay Place).
One day Craig moves a filing cabinet and discovers an old door behind it – and gets sucked through a portal into the mind of the distinguished actor John Malkovich. Craig experiences life as Malkovich, eating toast, reading the Wall Street Journal – and correcting a taxi driver who knows Malkovich is a famous actor but doesn’t remember why.
Then, after his Andy Warhol-predicted 15 minutes of fame, Craig gets ejected onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.
Craig is wowed by this “metaphysical can of worms,” as he calls it, but when he confides the details of his wild ride to Maxine (Catherine Keener), a sarcastic co-worker on whom he has a crush, she has more practical ideas.
Maxine, who previously wouldn’t give Craig the time of day, sees Malkovich’s fame as a money-making attraction – and places newspaper ads asking, “Did You Ever Want to Be Someone Famous?”
Soon people are lining up outside the Merton-Flemmer building and forking over $200 a pop for the thrill of experiencing Malkovich ordering hand towels from catalogues and foraging in his refrigerator for leftover Chinese food.
But the most avid tourists turn out to be Craig and his frumpy, animal-loving wife Lotte (an unrecognizable Cameron Diaz) – who develops her own sexual obsession with Maxine after her first trip through Malkovich.
Soon Lotte and Maxine are vying to manipulate Malkovich (and Maxine) toward their own romantic ends – with increasingly hilarious complications.
Malkovich gives an extraordinary performance as a highly stylized version of himself – a vain lecher with no compunctions about meeting a strange woman for a middle-of-the-night assignation, even when she insists on calling him “Lotte.”
And when Malkovich finally gets around to exploring his own portal, the results are literally mind-blowing.
It’s hard to imagine any other actor in this razor-sharp satire on contemporary celebrity. Malkovich fearlessly dons a variety of comical hairpieces, gives a near-nude performance as a life-size marionette and even has a fictional friendship with Charlie Sheen (who also plays himself).
Malkovich’s bravura work is nicely offset by the low-key performances of Cusack and Diaz, who help Jonze, a leading music-video director, keep the increasingly Kafkaesque proceedings grounded in a sort of alternative reality.
Keener is sharp and funny as the grasping Lotte, and Bean (a TV fixture in the 1950s and 1960s) is appropriately creepy as Dr. Lester, who has his own plans for Malkovich.
“Being John Malkovich,” which contains not a frame of extraneous footage, is more than a must-see movie: It’s a must-see-more-than-once event. The lightning-fast tour of Malkovich’s subconscious alone will keep future video watchers occupied for days.
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