Craig's Other's Other Wife.

Rating: 7/10 (20 September 2007)

This is a difficult movie to describe so you have to bear with me. John Cusack plays an unsuccessful puppeteer in New York, married to a thoroughly deglamorized Cameron Diaz. He has the hots for his sole employee, his tough and savvy office-mate, Catherine Keener.
Then he discovers a kind of crawlspace in his office, at the end of which is the sensorium of the actor John Malkovich. That is, Cusack can be in the mind of the real John Malkovich, but only for 15 minutes at a time, after which he is spit out and flops on the ground next to the New Jersey Turnpike. Cusack decides that if he can't get anyone to pay to see his puppets he can at least charge the public $200 apiece for their 15 minutes in Malkovich's mind. (This doesn't bother Malkovich because he seems completely unaware of anyone else's being inside him.) But Cusack's secretary, Keener, has the hots for Malkovich and through this "portal" is able to get his private phone number and agree to meet her at a restaurant. They meet, as arranged. However, when they sit across the table from one another and Keener gazes at Malkovich, glowing with admiration and a filthier kind of lust, Malkovich's mind happens to be occupied by Cameron Diaz at that moment. Diaz has previously spent time taking a shower with Malkovich and has found the idea of having a male's plumbing appealing. Now, she melts under the adoring gaze of Keener in the restaurant.
Diaz returns from Malkovich and tells her husband, John Cusack the failed puppeteer, that she must be a trans-sexual because she has never had a woman stare at her with such love as Keener showed towards Malkovich in the restaurant. Now she wants an operation and she's going to talk to Dr. Lester. The astounded Cusack shouts, "But Dr. Lester is an ALLERGIST!" The next evening, Cusack and his wife are having dinner at home with Keener. They explain the situation to her, then they both throw themselves on Keener at the same time. Keener slaps Cusack away and tells Diaz that, yes, she finds Diaz attractive -- but only when Diaz is in Malkovich.
Then it gets REALLY complicated. There is a pursuit at one point through the repressed memories of Malkovich's subconscious, with Malkovich seen peeing his pants on the school bus and sniffing panties. (Malkovich -- the real Malkovich -- must have a heck of a sense of humor. His character admits to being stoned, and we see him exercising his libido, being snooty towards cab drivers, and so forth.) The story ends up with Diaz fathering her own child by Keener while occupying Malkovich.
If this were a novel, it would be something like Kafka's "Metamorphosis" or Nicholson Baker's "The Fermata," both attempt to follow the logic of an absurd premise. It also packs a lot of humor and pathos into the story, along the lines of Pirandello and Ionescu. Example of what I mean: When John Cusack returns from his first trip into Malkovich's brain, he no longer has the piece of wood he took with him. In the face of Keener's skepticism, Cusack demands to know where that piece of wood IS. Did it disappear in the ether? Is it still somehow back there in Malkovich's brain? Good question. Keener, by the way, is very sexy. She has a throaty laugh, nice limbs, and she is strictly utilitarian, only interested in money and sex until she falls for Diaz. She never heard of either John Malkovitch or metaphysics.
As a film it most closely resembles something that Woody Allen might have come up with if Allen had been in the habit of ingesting psychedelic substances, or something Monty Python might have dreamed up without any chemical help. (I must say I didn't get much out of "Brazil.") If you want a sense of the lengths to which this film is willing to go, imagine a scene from "Swan Lake" being performed in front of a full audience, involving the entire corps de ballet, with a human-sized wooden puppet in the middle of a circle of ballerinas, and the puppet is unclothed, made of raw wood, with all his hinges and joints showing, and the audience stands up and applauds. In an era when American movies seem to have been formed by cookie cutters, this kind of innovation is startling.
Should you watch this? Well, I'll tell you how you can find out. You go to a clinical psychologist, see, and you sit down and take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), and then you ask the shrink what your profile looks like. If he says ANYTHING like, "You peaked on Scale Eight," you should definitely see this film because you'll appreciate and enjoy it more than most. Otherwise -- well, it's your mind.