Being John Malkovich

Being John Malkovich is a movie about the desire to be someone else. The characters in this film actually find a way to be someone else; in this case, they find a way to be John Malkovich.


Craig Schwartz (John Cusack), a very talented but unemployed puppeteer, is struggeling with the financial problems he and his wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) have. They are living in a filthy apartment in New York, with a lot of animals, among them a chimpanzee called Elijah. Lotte can hardly afford the rent wih the money she earns in a pet store and so she asks Craig to look for a job. Since he doesn't earn much with his performances on the street either, he decides to check the job offers in the newspaper. The only interesting thing for him is an offer  for a file clerk with "fast hands". When he visits the company to have an interview, he finds himself at a very strange place: The company is in the 7 1/2 floor, you have to stop the elevator between the 7th and 8th floor and then open the door with force. Besides the fact that the ceilings are very low and you have to stoop down constantly, the secretary just understands what she wants to, having the manager of the company, Lester (Orson Bean), think he has a speech impediment. Craig convinces Lester with his dexterous fingers and starts to work in the strange company. Despite his marriage with Lotte, he constantly tries to hit on his colleague Maxine (Catherine Keener) but she isn't interested in him at all. Even when he professes his love to her she stays totally unimpressed and keeps making fun of him. She is the complete opposite of the inconspicuous but yet very caring Lotte, cool-hearted and sexy. One day Craig finds a tiny door behind a filing cabinet in his office. Curiously he crawls in the aislethe secret door leads to and turns up again in the head of actor John Malkovich. He sees the world through his eyes for 15 minutes, then he gets spit out into a ditch on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. Excited, he runs back to tell Maxine about his experience. She acts totally unimpressed again and leaves the office but later that night she calls Craig to tell him that they should make a business out of his discovery, selling tickets for Malkovich for 200 Dollar. This turns out to be a fantastic idea, within short time their business is booming.

Craig tells his wife about the door as welland she wants to try it immediately. After being in John Malkovich she is absolutely euphoric and wants to go back at once, but she and Craig are invited for dinner at Lester's place. When Lotte is looking for the bathroom in Lester's house she accidentally finds a room which is full of pictures of Malkovich. The next day she is experiencing a kind of  self-discovery-crisis and goes to Craig's office to reveal her idea of a sexual reassignment surgery to Craig. She explains him that when she was in Malkovich she was feeling right for the first time in her life and therefore she wants to be a man. Meanwhile Maxine calls John Malkovich (while Lotte is in him) and convinces him to meet her. Lotte decides to find out who the cheeky woman on the phone was and goes through the portal at the time John and Maxine want to meet. She is suprised when Maxine shows up and she starts feeling attracted to her, too. So she suggests Craig to invite Maxine for dinner, which turns into a strange evening with Lotte and Craig fighting for the attractive woman's attention. It escalates with the married couple professing their love to Maxine. She turns down Craig again but tells Lotte that she is smitten with her, because she noticed Lotte in Malkovich the other night. She adds that she just wants to be with Lotte in this constellation and so they start arranging meetings with Lotte in Malkovich. Craig, who is out of his mind with jealousy, overpowers Lotte one day, ties her up and forces her to call Maxine. After arranging a meeting Craig locks Lotte in Elijah's monkey-cave. He "enters" Malkovich and manages to control him for a short time, having Malkovich saying what he wants like a puppet. This shocks Malkovich and terrified he breaks off relations with Maxine, who he blames to be a witch. He decides to get to the bottom of this issue, spying on Maxine and eventually following her to the portal to his own brain with a group of "customers". To convince himself he goes through the portal and ends up in a kind of parallel universe, where everyone and everything is "Malkovich". After getting spit out into the ditch he threatens to Craig with the court if he continues his business.

Meanwhile Lotte has managed to untie herself with the help of Elijah and calls Maxine to tell her what Craig has done to her. But Maxine, instead of being shocked is kind of impressed by Craig's ability to control John. She leaves Lotte broken-hearted and goes to see Malkovich / Craig. Lotte tries to find help at Lester's house and asks him about the Malkovich-room. It turns out that Lester in reality isn't Lester but a man called Captain Mertin. He has been using portals for 90 years now because for him this is the perfect way of living forever. He lives through the vessel's body and explains that Malkovich is the next vessel he is going to use. On his 44th birthday, when Malkovich will be "ripe", he will go through the portal. This has to happen by midnight tha day, because after that he would get diverted into the next newly forming infant vessel. In this case again, he would be absorbed and trapped in the host's brain, unable to control anything. Lester invites Lotte to join him and a couple of his friends. Apparently it is possible to go through the portal with more than one person. Lotte feels that now Lester has been so kind to her she has to tell him the truth about the Malkovich vessel. She decides to tell Lester everything that has happened with the door at the office.

Craig manages to stay inside Malkovich for a very long time. He uses his fame to become a known puppeteer al over the world and marries Maxine. But a few months later, after Maxine and Craig have achieved everything they wanted, Maxine, who is in an advanced stage of pregnancy, starts to pull back from her new husband. She seems to miss Lotte. Lester and his friends (including Lotte) kidnap Maxine and threaten Craig with killing her if he doesn't leave Malkovich's body. Maxine tells Lotte that the baby is actually hers as she got pregnant in the night Lotte was in Malkovich. Craig decides to release Malkovich's body to rescue Maxine, but she has decided to be with Lotte. Lester is able to enter the Malkovich vessel with his friends and continues living. 

The movie ends with a scene in which we can see how John Malkovich is visited by a friend (Charlie Sheen). John (rather Lester) is married to his former secretary and explains to Charlie his method to eternal life. They enter the room which was full with the photos of Malkovich but is now packed with pictures of the next vessel Emily: The daughter of Maxine and Lotte. It also turns out that Craig went through the portal again to overpower Malkovich and make Maxine love him again. But as he did so after midnight he got diverted into Emily, being a prisoner in her head, unable to control anything and forced to see the world and the happiness of Maxine and Lotte through her eyes forever. 

Being John Malkovich is about the urgent wish to be someone else. In this movie everybody has his reasons for that: The fear of death, the wish to be loved or just the feeling to be more comfortable in another body. When I watched the movie for the first time a few years ago I didn't understand anything of it. It was just this very weird film with a couple of funny scenes (the Malkovich parallel universe!) but I really didn't get what it wants to tell me. Whatever, it is a movie that makes you think. As far as I know it is also the only movie where an actor is playing himself in such a way. It is very intelligent and makes you think about philosophical questions. 

A thing that reminded me of this movie was a spiritual website. I came across this site by accident and there was an article about souls, in which the author said, that it is possible to have more than one soul in your body. These souls (so the article) can take over your body if they are strong enough and you have to force them to leave your body. The author said that this is the reason why we don't feel like ourselves some days.  I really don't believe in this kind of things, but still I had to think of this movie and that it is an interesting way to understand it as well.