"Being John Malkovich"

If all this isn't enough evidence that we've entered some kind of low-rent fairyland, there's more. The deranged receptionist, Floris (Mary Kay Place), has Dr. Lester (Orson Bean), the kindly boss, convinced that he suffers from a terrible speech impediment. "I've been very lonely in my isolated tower of indecipherable speech," Dr. Lester sighs to Craig. (All he wants to talk about, it turns out, is his elaborate sexual fantasies about Floris.) Rising above all this nonsense in supreme, feline disdain is the laconic Maxine (Catherine Keener). It probably took guts to cast box-office heartthrob Diaz as the dorky wife and indie character-actor Keener as the sex kitten, but when you see the latter slinking through the low-ceilinged halls of LesterCorp, with her brows raised and lips pursed, you can't imagine their roles reversed.

When Craig finally gets Maxine to go for a drink with him, he nervously starts to tell her that there's something he really likes about her. "Is it my tits?" she demands. Oh no, he insists, of course not. There's just something about her -- her attitude, her demeanor. Maxine isn't impressed. "Are you a fag?" she asks, rolling her eyes in exasperation. Totally defeated, Craig can only agree that her tits are great and that he wants to have sex with her. "Good," she says curtly, having gotten the affirmation she requires. "Not a chance." But when Craig discovers that one of LesterCorp's filing cabinets conceals a secret doorway that allows you to enter the mind of John Malkovich for 15 minutes -- before dumping you into a ditch next to the New Jersey Turnpike -- he sees it first and foremost as his chance to score with Maxine.

Mind you, neither Craig nor Maxine is entirely clear about who John Malkovich is, except that he's a famous actor. (If you're not sure either, his best-known roles are probably in "Dangerous Liaisons," "The Sheltering Sky" and "In the Line of Fire.") That's enough, apparently, for them to launch a clandestine business charging strangers $200 to take a shift inside Malkovich as he brushes his teeth, reads Chekhov or orders towels from a catalog. But when Lotte enters the Malkovich portal -- and Maxine stalks and seduces him while Lotte is inside -- things really get complicated. As Craig says, entering another person's mind "raises all sorts of philosophical questions." In "Being John Malkovich," those questions include whether Lotte is actually a transsexual, whose baby a child fathered by Lotte-as-Malkovich actually is and whether Sean Penn will follow Malkovich's shining example and abandon his acting career for puppetry.

Kaufman's screenplay takes some satirical whacks at celebrity worship and New Age self-absorption -- "Don't stand in the way of my self-actualization as a man," Lotte tells Craig. But its primary agenda is absurdism of the British-TV variety, in which the floodgates of the subconscious are thrown open and half-associated ideas come rushing out. Jonze and his terrific cast keep the movie going on its own giddy, nonsensical self-confidence for quite a while, but when the being-John-Malkovich gag begins to get old, "Being John Malkovich" loses steam rapidly.

By the time Craig locks Lotte in Elijah's cage and uses his puppetry skills to take full possession of Malkovich -- so he can finally make it with Maxine -- we've lost all our initial sympathy for him. We're never sure what Maxine is after (other than being everybody's object of desire), how Dr. Lester's diabolical scheme works or who finally ends up inside "the Malkovich vessel." In fact, the conclusion of "Being John Malkovich," which involves a frightening vision of Charlie Sheen, bald and clad in a Hawaiian shirt, reminds me a little of the incoherent final sequence of Stanley Kubrick's "2001." Both movies are daring and more than a little daft -- they take us on a hellacious ride and then fling us out beyond the Milky Way, skittering away into empty space like a runaway satellite.

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