Never Give A Puppeteer An Even Break

Rating: 8/10 (24 May 2005)

Craig Schwartz is a puppeteer who toils in obscurity, adapting medieval love stories for street-corner performances in the hope of making it big like that Christo of puppet masters, Derek Mantini. Then he stumbles onto a portal that leads him inside the mind of a real-life puppet, none other than the famous screen actor John Malkovich.
Oh, and he and his wife fall in love with the same woman, who is carrying a baby that's also the only portal to future earthly existence for a dirty old man and his aging friends.
"Being John Malkovich" is a high-concept comedy alright. Like Craig the puppeteer, it wants to raise issues in its askew way. I see it as a meditation on selfishness, puppetry being a metaphor for one imposing their will upon another. Craig selfishly throws his wife over for another woman, his wife throws him over for the same woman, and that woman is more selfish than the two put together. Of course, none of them get what they want. Meanwhile, the selfishness of the old man and his friends is homicidal since it involves the obliteration of another human being mind and soul.
Whatever the big idea, it is well-developed with help from a cast that includes John Cusack, Catherine Keener, and John Malkovich, who plays himself as well as Cusack's Craig Schwartz when the latter is inside of him. Malkovich doing Cusack doing Malkovich is some fine acting.
While too high-concept to reach for its laughs, "Being John Malkovich" doesn't forget to be funny. The Mertin-Flemmer early-80s orientation film is as great a send-up of bad acting as "Inside Amber Waves" was in "Boogie Nights." In addition to Malkovich, who is complemented warmly on his performance as "that retard," Charlie Sheen and Sean Penn have goofy cameos as themselves; Penn admitting he worries his own move into puppetry will be seen as slavish imitation of Malkovich. Brad Pitt throws in a single facial expression that slays me.
It's also amusing how the film plays up the ordinariness of Malkovich's life. He doesn't do much more then eat toast and order periwinkle bathmats, yet as Craig sells people tickets inside Malkovich's mind his customers emerge invariably joyous at the significance they've experienced. When Craig completes his hostile takeover of Malkovich, he decides to remake the actor as a puppeteer, and thus we are treated to a People magazine cover of a brooding Malkovich and the headline: "I will act no more forever." Somehow I don't think that would happen in reality, but of course playing with reality is where the fun is here.
Cameron Diaz is a real find in this film, as she plays the frowsy wife in a style akin to Louise Lasser's Mary Hartman. While Diaz's roles often play off her incredible beauty alone, "Being John Malkovich" is the one time she is called upon to really act, and she pulls it off, so much so it distracts from the fact her character is the most underwritten in the movie, more of a gag than anything else.
The resolution of the story feels contrived as well, not as amusing or coherent as the rest of the film, though the ending itself is solid. Seeing Craig's state in the end is a nice comment on his chosen career, though he doesn't do as badly as poor John.
One great thing about this movie is Orson Bean as the old man. Here's a guy I haven't seen in 20 years, and that was in a Q-Tip commercial, yet here he plays a central role and gets most of the laughs in a pretty funny film. "I don't want to be your link to history, boy, I want to feel my naked thighs next to Floris." "Being John Malkovich" is a big film about big ideas, but it draws some of its biggest light from the smallest stars.