Being John Malkovich (1999)

(New York City; contemporary)

Charlie Kaufmans groundbreaking meditation on puppetry as a metaphor for life. John Cusake is Craig Schwartz an unemployed puppeteer who lands a job as a filing clerk at a company based in the seventh-and-a-half floor of a New York City high-rise (it was designed as an optimal working environment for midgets). Schwartz discovers there-in a portal into the mind of acclaimed actor John Malkovich. Craig shares this secret with his wife (Camren Diaz) and a women he would like to have an affair with (Cathrine Keener). They establish a business that allows anyone to spend 15 minutes as a passenger in John Malkovich’s body, but eventually Craig gains sufficient skill at manipulating Malkovich’s person, that he decides to take up residence full time, re-directing his hosts career into the world of puppetry.

This is all needless to say a very bizarre concept for a movie, but it works and establishes quite well the existential field about which Kaufman enjoys writing, namely the subject of identity and self. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind explores this subject matter in pronounced regards to relationships, while Adaptation is more about the creative process as an expression of self. The metaphor in Malkovich is simultaneously more persise and abstract with one person literaly becoming another yet unable to cease being ones self. Perhaps this can be interpreted as the internal pointlessness of attempting to be something we are not, or perhaps its about something else entirely. Whatever its about exactly, and that was doubtless meant to be at least semi-ambiguous, it’s a creative, entertaining and lightly though provoking work.

See also: Donnie Darko (2001)