There are some films with a premise so simple and so unanswerably brilliant they make all aspiring screenwriters slap their foreheads with envy and self-loathing. Six years ago it was: "Of course... a moving bus... with a bomb that explodes if it goes under a certain speed! Why didn't I think of that?"
Now it can only be a case of: "Of course... a failing puppeteer who works on the 7½th floor of a Manhattan office-building and accidentally discovers a tiny door that leads directly into John Malkovich's head! Why didn't I think of that? It's been staring me in the face!"
Being John Malkovich is the outrageously funny new movie from director Spike Jonze, with a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, whose every scene, every line, every narrative refinement, every exquisitely hand-tooled joke and sight-gag is of the purest gold. Jonze and Kaufman take us on a cheeky raid behind the enemy lines of thinkability in the cinema, into the realm of the six impossible things the Red Queen believed before breakfast.
John Cusack plays Craig Schwartz, a sweaty, unshaven puppeteer, miserably resentful that no one appreciates his street theatre art, and forced to ply his trade in New York's uncaring thoroughfares. Finally compelled to find a day job, he becomes a lowly filing clerk on a bizarre, secret quasi-mezzanine floor of a skyscraper, a place where the ceilings are four feet high and everyone goes about their business bent double. Here Craig meets and falls abjectly in lust with the mysterious Maxine, instantly forgetting about his homely wife, Lotte, a pet shop attendant who brings home sick parrots and conflicted chimps.
It is one of this film's sly reversals and pre-emptive strikes that it is Cameron Diaz who is cast as the dowdy wife - with "no-make-up" make-up and unflattering perm - while Catherine Keener is the other woman, her innate sexiness effortlessly surviving having to walk around like Groucho Marx.
Their three lives are changed by the discovery of this magic portal, the door that leads into the consciousness of one of the grooviest, classiest, campest celebrities on the block. For a Warholian 15-minute session, they can see what Malkovich sees, feel what Malkovich feels; they experience him sorting through his mail, ordering a new periwinkle-blue shade of bathmat in that fluting, mellifluous voice - before they are ejected ecstatically onto a grass verge by the New Jersey turnpike.
The film effects a terrifying mise-en-abîme when John furiously discovers what is going on and demands to go through the door himself into his own mind, with astonishing results. But not before Lotte has discovered she kinkily enjoys being John Malkovich while he is having actual-reality sex with Maxine: "It's as if the portal is vaginal," breathes Lotte wonderingly. "It shows John's feminine side."
This film comes as close as it is possible to get to a sustained nirvana of giggling, a hovering delirium of comedy. It's like breathing in nitrous oxide, making you feel liable at any moment to float away. It has a Woody Allen-ish quality - and Cusack's performance is not that far from his lead in Bullets Over Broadway - but not so much Allen's films as the playful short stories. It has something of the F Anstey of Vice Versa, and the Gore Vidal of Myra Breckinridge and Myron, and also a little of The Truman Show and EDtv.
Being John Malkovich brings a light touch to the important things it says about the ballooning cult of celebrity, how the aristocracy of the famous bombards us with gilded, gorgeous lives and hyper-real existences from every screen - subtly encouraging us to believe not merely in the inferiority of the non-famous existence, but its relative unreality. And in doing so, it returns us to the childlike reverie, as we look down at our hands, arms, and the tapering perspective of our bodies, of what it is like to be someone else. And further, to wondering what it is to be ourselves.
The choice of John Malkovich himself is inspired: he treats the role with a sporting lack of pomposity and yet absolute seriousness. In doing so, he has magnified his reputation and career a thousandfold. (For 10 minutes after the house lights went up, and I gently came down, I tried to think of any British name with the class to bring off the same tightrope act. Someone with grandeur and style, a premiership celebrity player who is simultaneously able to make a knight's-move away from, and above celebrity. Being Ian McKellen?)
Put simply, Being John Malkovich just has to be one of funniest, cleverest films of the year, a Fabergé egg of comic delight.