John Cusack stars as Craig, a street puppeteer, with neurotic dark characters as puppets, taken from his life experiences, while his wife Lotte (watch out Goethe's young Werther, Lotte's married and she is not as adorable as was), played by Cameron Diaz, runs a pet store, thus making their home overrun by animal boarders. Her name and comparison to Goethe's love Lotte, described in The Sorrows of Young Werther represent in this reviewer's humble opinion the most interesting idea behind this movie.
Craig, in order to be able to pay the bills, finds a filing job and finds himself on 7.5 floor of a building, the floor that looks as it comes from some of the Monty Phyton sketch, but then again, sometimes the way the company you work for is presented to you (by forcing you to watch some video) tends to be even more ridiculous than the whole Python series. At work, Craig meets Maxine (Catherine Keener) and lusts for her, but she rejects him, labelling him a loser before he had any real opportunity with her.
Behind a filing cabinet at work, Craig finds a doorway, crawls into it and finds himself in a brain of the actor John Malkovich for exactly 15 minutes, than falls from the sky next to a New Jersey turnpike. This is the main idea within the film, which has by now fallen onto a level of low budget early South American surreal movies. As long as there is something that falls out of the sky or is out of the ordinary, does not mean it is a valuable idea. It is not the entrance into Malkovich's brain, but the New Jersey turnpike that I have a problem with, it feels as if a writer just did not know how to end the trip inside Malkovich. The psychology behind the trip itself is nicely done, it is sad and satirical at the same time.
Maxine pressures Craig to get into business and start charging $200 for a 15 minutes trip inside Malkovich. Craig, looking for the ultimate puppeteering experience learns to a bit by bit to control Malkovich. At one point, Malkovich enters himself and the world around him becomes... Well, I won't tell you, just that Roger Ebert was really impressed and I thought the idea was completely unimaginative.
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