Malkovich Malkovich, Malkovich? Malkovich: Malkovich!

The title of "Being John Malkovich" is pretty self-explanatory, even if it does open up what one character calls as a philosophical can of worms regarding the nature of the self. But it's also pretty unnecessary, because "Being John Malkovich" is two words too long. For a movie that preoccupies itself with the construction of identity - granted, this examination is submerged beneath ten layers of quirky hilarity that the concept of getting into John Malkovich's head for 15 minutes doesn't even begin to hint at -just plain old "Being" might be a better name.

That said, the full title is certainly the kind of built-in advertising campaign that gets people buying tickets. It's difficult to imagine marketing a film titled, say, "Being Martin Hebrank" or "Being Janice Stemple." Yet that's the exact question

Courtesy of Gramercy Pictures John Malkovich realizes that he has not quite been himself lately.

I found myself asking as I walked out of the theatre: Would "Being John Malkovich" have been a different movie if John Malkovich the character wasn't John Malkovich the actor (or vice versa, as the film would have us believe)? I don't think so. There's enough to ponder here that even without introducing the brain invasion plot, this inventive film is refreshingly compelling.

Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) is an out of work puppeteer who swallows his pride and resorts to the classifieds for work. His wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), is an animal lover and works in a pet store; their apartment seem more like a zoo than a home, and when Lotte asks Craig if he'd like to have a baby, it's hard to know if she's serious - they already have several creature companions with four legs and diapers. But there's little out there for puppeteers in "today's wintry economic climate," he blithely tells her, so with her encouragement he applies for a job that requires dextrous fingers.

That job is with Lestercorp, which is located on the seventh-and-a-half floor of the Mertin-Flemmer building in New York City. The floor, which can only be accessed by jamming the elevator between floors seven and eight, is so unique that it has its own promotional-instructional video that is shown to new residents during their orientation. Overhead is low, and so are the ceilings; everything is built to half-scale. Sound weird? It gets weirder.

One day, Craig discovers a mysterious little door behind a filing cabinet. The hum and flicker of fluorescent lights and too-pure air conditioning ominously precede his investigation of the door, which turns out to be a portal into - you guessed it - John Malkovich's head. Craig "sees what he sees, feels what he feels." For the puppeteer it's like the best, most lifelike control he's ever had of a so-called inaminate object.

Meanwhile, the married Craig is chasing like a drooling St. Bernard after Maxine (Catherine Keener), a hot career woman whose sex appeal is superceded only by her cruelly teasing attitude. In a pathetic attempt to impress her, he tells her about the portal. "Who the fuck is John Malkovich?" is Maxine's immediate response; her second response is to market and sell tickets to Malkovich. The craziness of such a scheme garners the pair $200 a pop, and much more: A love triangle for which the word bizarre was invented.

Who, what and how this triangle comes to be - and is resolved - occupies the remainder of the film, with the only true victim being Malkovich himself. He doesn't really appear until midway through the film, but his presence is, as expected, inimitable, and if it weren't so funny it would be sad to watch his true personality get subverted to the repeated penetrations into his mind by various controllers. It takes a very talented actor to pull off pretending to be two people at the same time; Nic Cage and John Travolta pulled it off in "Face/Off," and Malkovich succeeds here as well. Indeed, the film's biggest laughs come when Malkovich parodies Malkovich. There are few things more amusing than watching Malkovich-as-Craig-controlling-Malkovich snarl at himself, "Shut up, you overrated sack of shit!"

"Being John Malkovich" is written and directed by two first-timers, Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, respectively. Whatever mind-altering drugs Kaufman was under the influence of when he birthed this script, here's hoping he embraces the joys of addiction and starts pumping out more like this one. Jonze, meanwhile, giddily envisions this nutty world where actors can become puppeteers in the blink of an eye and wooden puppets can seem far more vibrant than flesh and blood.

The surreality of the invasion of the Malkovich snatchers is what makes "Being John Malkovich" more than your run-of-the-mill comedy. It has some serious underpinnings hiding deep beneath the situational hilarity. It is, in some ways, a love conquers all morality at work, although the parting words and shot of the film are far more nightmarish than the denouement initially purports to be.

Then again, maybe it fits in perfectly with the dark, possessive comedy of the film, a place where Malkovich is not Malkovich, where movie stars who routinely make the heart beat faster look like they were beaten with an ugly stick, where industry rookies take absurdity to an entirely new level. This is by far the most distinctly original film of the year; where others have mined familiar territory with a very pointed view to laughter and tears, "Being John Malkovich" jumps all the way through the looking glass and comes out unscathed on the other side.

11-04-99