The film centers around a puppeteer named Craig Schwartz, who gets a job at the Lestercorp company in the fictional Mertin-Flemmer building in New York City. One day he finds a door in the wall of an office; going through it, he is transported into the brain of actorJohn Malkovich. He sees, hears, and feels everything Malkovich experiences for about fifteen minutes, and is then deposited into a ditch next to the New Jersey Turnpike. Schwartz and Maxine, a co-worker to whom he is unrequitedly attracted, set up a night business charging people to experience it. Schwartz eventually becomes adept at controlling Malkovich and resides in the body for several months before an ending in which he is absorbed into the body of the unborn baby of Maxine and Malkovich (conceived while Schwartz's wife Lotte was inside Malkovich).
The film was widely praised for its originality, both in terms of the script and Jonze's direction. Kaufman's blending of fact and outrageous fiction was a theme continued in his next film with Jonze, Adaptation (which features Kaufman himself as a character and briefly touches on the making of Being John Malkovich). Jonze's direction and the performances of the lead actors was also viewed favourably by most critics. As well as Malkovich's performance as himself (or at least a version of himself; his middle name in the film is Horatio, which is not his real middle name), Cameron Diaz's small role attracted considerable attention, at least partly as she was almost unrecognizable as the dowdy Lotte.
John Gavin Malkovich (born December 9, 1953) is an Academy Award-nominated American actor, producer and director.
John Malkovich was born in Christopher, Illinois, to father Daniel Malkovich, a state conservation director and publisher of a conservation magazine, and Joe Anne, who owned the Benton Evening News in Benton, Illinois, as well as the Outdoor Illinois.
Malkovich also plays the main villain Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom in the movie "Con Air." Though he played the title role in the Charlie Kaufman-penned BeingJohn Malkovich, he is playing a slight variation of himself, as indicated by the character's middle name of "Horatio".
"BeingJohnMalkovitch" is a strange (even crazy) film, based on a completely absurd and fantastic idea, that behind a file cabinet in a surreal office on the 71/2 floor of a New York office building there exists a passageway into actor JohnMalkovitch's mind.
John Cusack plays Craig, a long-haired struggling puppeteer (is "puppeteer" actually a viable profession these days in the art world?) who is forced to "sell out" and take a job as a file clerk to survive financially.
Then, she seduces him (this sex scene, by the way, is one of the few "justifiable" sex scenes I've seen in years-- justifiable in the sense that it's artistically relevant andnot there simply to pander to the audience; and as a result, it's erotic).
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