Creates, and redeems, a brand new perversion

Rating: 10/10 (22 July 2000)

Puppeteering, for Craig (John Cusack), is the nearest thing to his heart's desire, getting inside another person's skin to animate his soul. It doesn't pay well, so he file-clerks on floor seven-and-a-half of the world's weirdest office building--everyone on this midget-sized floor has to walk around hunched over at the waist. Craig's wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) wants a baby but makes do with babying disturbed chimps and other castoff fauna.
At the office, Craig lusts after no-nonsense Maxine (Catherine Keener). At the after-office-hours watering hole, when he says he's a frustrated puppeteer, she's like, "Waiter! Check please!" But after behind a file cabinet he discovers a secret portal into the mind of actor John Malcovich (played by himself)--this is, after all, a fantasy--she senses a business opportunity. They can charge unfulfilled souls $200 to spend 15 minutes in celebrity skin and be spit out safely by the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.
No one is keener to try it than Lotte. Somehow she knows it'll be ecstasy, and it is: she immediately wants to become a transsexual. Hearing this, Maxine, cool to Craig but warm to Lotte, has a hot flash which stands her nipples at attention: she'll seduce Malcovich while Lotte is inside him. When Lotte digs it and Craig finds out, Craig locks Lotte in the chimp's cage and, unbeknownst to Maxine and Malcovich, replaces her as the third in a unique ménage à trois.
From here, the permutations of identify transfer proliferate to the delight of the viewer, if not always the onscreen characters. The movie creates a brand new form of perversion and then redeems it. Without giving away the ending, it can be revealed that this film extends metaphors of getting inside another person--sex, identity transfer, puppeteering--into unsuspected avenues of redemption and intimations of both novel and traditional versions of immortality.