Being John Malkovich

Starring John Cusack, Cameron Diaz,
Catherine Keener and John Malkovich
Written by Charlie Kaufman
Directed by Spike Jonze
USA 1999
113 mins

An unemployed puppeteer in a forlorn marriage, having gained employment as a filing clerk, crawls through a secret door and finds himself inside the mind of the actor John Malkovich...
As plot synopses go this one takes some beating.

Director Spike Jonze began making skating films and moved on to pop videos - working with some of the biggest acts of the 1990s including Sonic Youth, Beastie Boys, Björk and Daft Punk. 'Being John Malkovich' was his feature debut and he takes its extraordinary premise and runs with it - taking us with him. The invention, wit and strange humour of the film earned the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman an Academy Award nomination - he would later win an Oscar for 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'. His surreal script meshes real world people with fictional characters who inhabit a fluid universe where gender and personality combine and recombine. It's also very funny!

John Cusack, who we last saw playing Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys in 'Love and Mercy' got the part when he asked his agent to go out and find him the "craziest, most unproduceable script you can find." He subsequently auditioned and won the role.

The late, great American critic Roger Ebert said of this film: 'Rare is the movie where the last half hour surprises you just as much as the first, and in ways you're not expecting. The movie has ideas enough for half a dozen films, but Jonze and his cast handle them so surely that we never feel hard-pressed; we're enchanted by one development after the next.’