More than we need to know?

Rating: 8/10 (23 July 2005)

A frustrated puppeteer gets a new job in a building with a '7-1/2' floor, where the ceilings are too low and everyone has to stoop down. He finds a hidden entry hole in the wall and, crawling in, finds himself sucked into the head of actor John Malkovich (playing himself), feeling & hearing everything the actor does. After 15 minutes, the puppeteer is suddenly spat out on the side of a New Jersey road. You would think it can't get any weirder than that, but the story actually comes up with a plot to explain why all this is happening (which may or may not be good - I sorta liked the mystery behind this odd stuff). Soon, the puppeteer (Cusack), his strange wife, and a cold fish co-worker (Keener) hatch a plan to charge people $200 a pop for spending 15 minutes inside Malkovich's head (it always comes back to plain old capitalism, don't it?). The story progresses on for further twists until it reaches the stature of an odd mini-epic, despite obviously BEING low-budget (the lighting, in particular, stinks in places, tho this may be on purpose). I can understand why this almost won the Best Screenplay Oscar: the makers took the potential of the premise as far as it can go, but most 'mainstream' viewers, as I've read elsewhere, will find this baffling: What is the point? What is it really all about? Well, it may be worth the rental just to watch Malkovich hamming it up as a sideways version of himself, tripping on the twilight-zone-like nature of the story and reinventing himself for the camera. But, I also see visions of writers holed up for a week, writing non-stop, taking the story in directions based on frantic brainstorming. That's not bad, but did we really need to know any of this, this result?