Being John Malkovich is a daring meditation on envy. The Insider will make a lot of people angry.

Being John Malkovich is everything I've ever dreamed of in a crazy comedy. It's close to pure farce, yet its laughs are grounded in loneliness, impotence, self-loathing, and that most discomfiting of vices to dramatize: envy. The action is surreal, the emotions are violently real. The screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, is a genius at finding slapstick correlatives for people's nebulous sense--or non-sense--of themselves. It's possible that no one has ever come up with a more absurdly perfect metaphor for our longing to be someone--anyone--other than who we are than a portal into the head of John Malkovich.

Kaufman's protagonist, Craig Schwartz (John Cusack), is a soulfully unkempt puppeteer whose wildly ambitious work is ignored while his gimmicky rivals thrive. When he reports for a drudge job as a file clerk, the office is between the seventh and eighth floors of a Manhattan skyscraper--it's the seven-and-a-halfth floor, where people walk stooped and make feeble jokes about the "low overhead." That low ceiling--a constant reminder of how Craig has been stunted--is the first sign of the movie's comic astuteness, of its knack for devising sight gags with a sting. When a sleek and derisive colleague named Maxine (Catherine Keener) rebuffs his advances and mocks his art, Craig argues passionately on behalf of his puppets: He says that everyone longs to be inside someone else's head. On cue, he discovers a passageway behind a file cabinet that whooshes him into the head of Malkovich and then disgorges him, after 20 minutes, into a ditch beside the New Jersey Turnpike. The poor sap can't keep his secret. He tells the girl, who is soon selling tickets to the Malkovich experience. The biggest Malkovich addict turns out to be Craig's nerdily frazzled wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), who sums up the thrill for the rest of the characters. "Being inside did something to me," she says. "I knew who I was."

The director, Spike Jonze (he played the skinny redneck in Three Kings), comes to BeingJohn Malkovich from music videos, but the movie isn't a digitized bag of tricks like FightClub. Jonze is never in your face: His instincts must have told him that hyping gags this outlandish would turn the picture into camp. He keeps the action slightly remote and the jokes deadpan, and the upshot is that the audience almost never stops giggling. The first hour and change has a magical fluidity. The scenes between Cusack and Keener boast the best emasculating banter since Christopher Durang's Beyond Therapy, and when Lotte and Maxine begin to communicate erotically through Malkovich's body, the film becomes a transsexual (and transcendental) screwball comedy. The script has a free-association quality that turns audiences on--they love not knowing where they're going. I wonder if Kaufman, when he started writing, even knew that the protagonist would stumble on that portal, or what he'd find when he went through. (The head of John Malkovich??!!??)

That the vessel is Malkovich might be the movie's most brilliantly unsettling touch, since the actor--although undeniably great--is one of our most distant and weirdly insular. You can understand the masses fantasizing about being Bruce Willis or being Tom Hanks, but being John Malkovich? What's lodged under that thick brow is anybody's guess. Evidently quite the heterosexual, he still courts sexual ambiguity: He speaks in querulous tones and bats the most insolently feminine lashes this side of Bugs Bunny. Weird or not, though, he's a celebrity: He exists. And Malkovich makes a wonderful Malkovich. The actor sends up his own preening aloofness, and he has never been more emotionally exposed than when it dawns on him that his smug façade has been literally penetrated. When he attempts to fathom what's happening to him, Jonze and Kaufman deliver a coup de cinema--a vision of hell that isn't, à la Sartre, other people, but oneself ad infinitum.

Being John Malkovich should have ended right there, since the filmmakers never top that hysterical sequence. Kaufman seems to have written himself into a corner. In the last half-hour he ties things up too neatly and the craziness--and some of the helium--goes out of the movie. Why do crazy comedies need closure? As Cusack's character becomes more twisted, he loses his stature (and the audience's good will), and the climax has too many dissonances. Kaufman and Jonze end up sentimentalizing the longing for a collective consciousness in a way I found creepy: Do they mean to be retelling Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the body-snatchers' point of view? (If so, the film is even darker than I think it is.)

The last part diminishes the movie, but not enough to wreck it: It's still an amazing piece of work. What other madcap farce would dare to have a score--it's by the superb Carter Burwell--so plangent and melancholy? Or to cast that sunny goddess Cameron Diaz as a nerd? The actress retains her essential sweetness, but the transformation is otherwise remarkable: Her Lotte is such a mouth breather that she nearly drools, and Diaz manages to look estranged from that lovely body. Even more dazzling is Keener, an actress who has lately been stuck playing nice, sensible women but who here is all silken curves and withering putdowns--she greets Craig's declaration of love with a pitying sigh that brings the house down. Keener's Maxine is so glamorously, tantalizingly self-contained that you can almost believe she never dreams of being John Malkovich.

T he Insider is a big, overlong, and rather unwieldy piece of storytelling, but the story it has to tell is so vital that it cuts through all the dramaturgical muddiness. It's a terrific muckraking melodrama--it will get people fuming. It's about big-business mendacity and the lawyers who do its bidding, and about what happens to corporate whistle-blowers in a society where the mainstream media are also in the hands of corporations. The movie tells two interlocking stories: The first is about Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), former vice president for research and development at the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, who is persuaded to go public with revelations about how cigarette manufacturers manipulate the chemicals in their product for maximum addictiveness. (Despite their testimonies in Congress, Wigand says, tobacco executives regard cigarettes as "a nicotine delivery system.") The second story concerns the 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), the man who persuaded Wigand to come forward. Bergman watches in horror as his network, CBS, backs away from the story under pressure from the corporate wing--which fears, at a time when CBS is on the block, the impact of a major lawsuit on its value. (Oddly unmentioned in the film is that then-owner Lawrence Tisch had his own tobacco company, Lorillard, and had separate dealings with Brown & Williamson.)

We're used to hearing tales of witnesses, informants, or whistle-blowers who are urged to come forward and then, after they do, are "hung out to dry"--i.e., left unprotected by the agents who approached and exploited them. What gives this version its kick--and what has made it fodder for columnists for almost six months--is that the people who betray the whistle-blower are among the most famous and powerful journalists in America: Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt, the co-anchor and the executive producer of 60 Minutes. If they could be pressured to "spike" a segment that they knew to be true, the film implicitly asks, how much chance do others have of breaking stories about corporate wrongdoing? And what about news personnel with a financial stake in their companies? Even journalists and editors known for their integrity tend to look the other way at their own companies' malfeasances when they hear words like "stock options" and "IPO."

But the movie's emotional hook isn't the CBS infighting or Bergman's quest to get the story. It's the fate of Wigand, played by Crowe as a prickly, blockish fellow with no social skills--an edgy wonk. Already isolated by temperament, he seems more vulnerable than a conventionally nice martyr. Wigand appears to have no friends, and his wife (a nearly unrecognizable Diane Venora), a Southern debutante type who clearly didn't bargain for a life of social and financial ostracization, is on the verge of bailing out on him even before the bullets start appearing in the family's mailbox and the death threats on Wigand's computer. You can't always tell what Crowe is doing--his opacity is sometimes a little too opaque. What's plain, though, is that Wigand doesn't want to have this role, didn't ask for it, and has no support system to get him through it. He's entirely dependent on Bergman, with whom he mostly communicates by cell phone and fax.

The director, Michael Mann, has never tried to tell a story as complex (or nonviolent) as The Insider, and he and his co-screenwriter, Eric Roth, don't shape their narrative very satisfyingly. Wigand and Bergman are both "insiders," and both, ultimately, whistle-blowers. (It was Bergman's spilling his guts to the New York Times that finally shamed CBS into running the Wigand interview.) But although the 60 Minutes producer is played by the star (Pacino grandstands, but not to the point of distraction), Bergman's story doesn't have the same primal force. Wigand's dark night of the soul is in a hotel, indicted, financially ruined, threatened with death, minus his wife and daughters; Bergman's is in an expensive-looking beach house with his warmly supportive spouse (Lindsay Crouse).