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So, Craig swallows his pride and answers a newspaper ad (remember those?) for a mysterious job on floor 7 1/2 of an office building in Manhattan. Here, he finds himself employed by an eccentric nonagenarian with a rock star social life, and sharing an office with a backbiting shrew named Maxine (Catherine Keener) to whom he develops an immediate, unrequited attraction. Soon, we see that despite having a devoted wife and an inflated sense of his own intellect, Craig is actually nothing more than a simpering tool, unable to count his blessings and desperate to possess only that which he can never have.

Maxine gleefully rebukes Craig’s advances with all the predatory mercy of a pack of hyenas, utterly emasculating him at every opportunity. Now with his marriage in a rut, his dreams of puppet-glory dashed and his manhood in question, Craig’s life seems more like a nightmare than ever. And then, he discovers a mysterious door behind a filing cabinet in his office. When he enters, he discovers a portal into the mind of actor John Malkovich – he is literally able to become Malkovich, seeing and experiencing the world through the eyes of the world famous thespian. Desperate to impress Maxine with this discovery, Craig regales her with all manner of rambling philosophical theories about it. Maxine, soulless hellcat that she is, declares that her primary interest in this phenomenon is to exploit it for money. This they do, eventually offering patrons 15 minutes inside the mind of Malkovich for $200. It’s bad enough that Maxine sees him simply as a tool for her own ambition; and then Craig’s wife discovers their scheme.

Lotte becomes obsessed with the portal, uncovering things about herself and her marriage that leave Craig backpedaling on the whole enterprise as his life suddenly spins out of control. In the middle of this is poor Malkovich, who has begun to sense each time someone enters his head. Frightened and confused about what’s happening, he begins to lean on his celebrity status to cope, prompting some of the film’s more wickedly funny sequences. Craig, Maxine and Lotte waste little time in deciding to use this portal for their own selfish ends, and since Malkovich doesn’t seem to be using his brain anyway, so much the better. But it isn’t long before being John Malkovich starts to make everyone’s life a living hell.

Philosophically, Being John Malkovich poses a lot of questions, reminding me of the old parable of the genie and the three wishes. Be careful what you desire, what you resent, and what you ask for. Because if you somehow were given an opportunity to obtain everything you’ve always wanted without earning it, there’s a good chance this would screw up your life in ways you hadn’t anticipated. We experience failure and rejection for a reason, and that is to make us better, stronger people – the only type of people who are truly wired to handle success. At least, I think that’s what the movie is trying to tell us.

Things unravel a bit in the final act, when the story hobbles itself by trying to explain the origin and purpose of the mysterious Malkovich head-hole. It reminds me of the scene in the Star Wars prequels where we discover that the Force is nothing more than a biological disorder, rather than the broad metaphor for spiritual faith some of us suspected. In that case, half of what made Star Wars interesting in the first place was obliterated in an instant. In this case, there’s a dramatic reasoning behind the Big Reveal, and I suppose it worked well enough in the end. But attempts to ground a work of such extreme fantasy in reality only serve to take the wind out of the story and dull the ultimate emotional impact.

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