Instant cult classic

Rating: 8/10 (18 April 2001)

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)
This is a strikingly original film that is part science fiction, part love triangle romance, and part comedy with an undercurrent of psychological insight into human relationships, marred slightly by some familiar elements in the resolution. Charlie Kaufman, who wrote the script, and Spike Jonze who directed, are to be commend for being so daring and free with the usual notions of reality while callously demonstrating just how selfish human relationships can be. To analyze this film is very much beside the point, but I'm going to do a little bit of that anyway.
John Cusack stars as an out of work puppeteer with a cheating heart. Cameron Diaz is his hard-working mousey little wife who supports him and a menagerie of animals including a chimpanzee ensconced in their New York apartment. An early scene shows her going off to work while Cusack rolls over and goes back to sleep. Catherine Keener enters the scene with her big smile and long legs as a supremely confident amoral user of people and quickly becomes the focus of the triangle as both Cusack and Diaz fall in madly in love with her. She, however, is not so enamored. She is not attracted to Cusack at all and tells him so, and finds Diaz interesting but only after seeing her adoring eyes inside the eyes of John Malkovich, who plays himself.
Offbeat enough? Not yet. Cusack has met Keener through his new job as a fast-fingered file clerk at a data storage firm with offices on the seventh and a half floor in a New York high rise. The floor is just about four and a half feet high (low overhead!) so that everybody has to bend over whenever they stand up. Orson Bean plays the head of the firm who is 110 years old or so with Mary Kay Place as his annoying secretary. While filing Cusack drops a folder behind a filing cabinet. He pulls out the cabinet and lo and behold discovers a little Alice in Wonderland door. He opens it and crawls forward in the dark and swoosh! is drawn into the person of actor John Malkovich, who is going about his daily life. Cusack looks out and sees what John is seeing, hears what John is hearing, experiences what John is experiencing. He is BEING John Malkovich!
Okay, we have our strikingly original premise. Where the film goes from here is the tough part. It includes some funny shtick and some intriguing ideas about identity, a prospect for immortality, Malkovich being turned into a puppet, some unusual sex games, a couple of appearances by Charlie Sheen as his contemporary self and later as a balding middle aged man, ending with the resolution of the triangle and a hint of a possible sequel. I was entertained mainly because of the strong performances by Keener, Cusack, Malkovich and Diaz. I was somewhat disappointed that the last part of the film did not live up to the beginning in terms of originality. The old people waiting for rebirth reminded me of something out of Cocoons (1985). But Cusack's prospective life as a little girl was a chuckle to contemplate, and I couldn't help but applaud Keener's sly triumph. But enough of these beguiling hints about what happens. See it for yourself.