Running time: 112 minutes
Starring: John Cusack, Catherine Keener, Cameron Diaz, John Malkovich, Orson Bean
Rating 10 out of 10
Admit it - at one time or another, we've all fantasised about what it would be like to be someone else; to leave behind the heaving carcass of our dreary, pedestrian, everyday rituals and experience the world through another person's eyes. Perhaps somebody famous like a model or a singer or an award-winning actor.Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) knows that feeling all too well. A gifted but penniless street puppeteer, he's swiftly coming to realise that New York City doesn't appreciate his `unique talents'. Nor, as it turns out, does his wife of 10 years, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), who works in a pet shop and tends to bring her work home with her.
Then something magnificently weird happens when Craig begins working as a filing clerk at LesterCorp's skyscraping office block. By chance, he discovers a opening in the wall behind one of the filing cabinets. Nervously crawling inside, Craig is suddenly sucked through a dark, wet corridor at high speed and with a blinding flash of white light, he finds himself looking through another man's eyes. At first, Craig has no idea whose life he has inexplicably gate-crashed, but as the person passes a mirror, he catches sight of a familiar face. A very familiar face: Hollywood actor John Malkovich.
For the next 15 minutes, Craig is a silent witness to Malkovich's daily routines and then, just as suddenly as he was sucked into the actor's head, Craig finds himself deposited unceremoniously on the verge of the New Jersey Turnpike.
Sensing a great money-making opportunity, Craig lets beautiful work colleague Maxine (Catherine Keener) in on his incredible secret and together the pair turn the portal into Malkovich's head into the city's hottest tourist attraction, giving customers the unique chance to see how the rich and famous live. For a small but very reasonable fee, of course.
Cusack is marvellous as the hapless sap who loses everything to the predatory Maxine, played with bewitching sensuality by indie queen Keener.
Star of the show, in more ways than one though, is Malkovich who mocks his public image with gleeful and mischievous abandon, playing his fictional self as an excessively vain and really quite tedious individual, so that being John Malkovich isn't half as interesting or as thrilling as it first sounds. A criticism that could certainly never be levelled at Jonze's bravura mindtrip.
