Okay, here's the deal. I remember distinctly the first time I saw Andy Kaufman, and he suckered me. He caught me in the con job that he caught most of the world on. On "Saturday Night Live", he walked onstage, and looked absolutely scared to death. He tried to speak, but this little voice, with the oddest dialect I'd ever heard, just couldn't carry him. I remember sitting there thinking, "Oh, this poor man. Whose twisted sense of humor allowed this man to suffer like this on national TV?"
Then, he decided to play a record, believe it or not. A scratchy copy of the old "Mighty Mouse" theme song. He stood there beside the record player, and just looked around. Then, when the big tenor voice on the record belted out "Here I come to save the day!" Andy lip-synced that line. Only that line. Then he stood and waited for the line to come again, and acted it out again. And I was on the floor laughing. And I never stopped laughing at Andy Kaufman.
I wondered for a long time if anyone would be brave enough to try and make a film about Andy, for two main reasons. One, nobody would ever be able to figure him out enough to write a script for it, and two, nobody would ever be able to play Andy Kaufman and do him justice. He was too unique, too individualistic. Besides, who'd want to direct a film about a human enigma? Never happen!
Guess what? It did.
It happened, and it happened better than any of us could've imagined. Man on the Moon, the biography of Kaufman directed by Milos Forman and starring Jim Carrey is in theatres now, and, people, whether you knew of Andy Kaufman before this or not, this film will make you a fan of the true artist that Kaufman was. He was absurdly brilliant, and his biopic is just the same -- absurdly brilliant.
It's hard to give you a plot outline here, because the story itself is Kaufman. He started mesmerizing both audiences and fellow comedians with his unorthodox routines, which varied from the Mighty Mouse routine to a dead-on Elvis impression, and much more. George Shapiro (Danny DeVito), a manager, spotted Andy in a club and signed him, not knowing what he was really getting. From nightclubs, he lept to the now-legendary performances on "SNL". Kaufman gained more fame in ABC's "Taxi", playing a variation of his "foreign man" club character, known on the show as Latka Gravas. But success on TV wasn't enough for Andy. He had to keep pushing the limits of entertainment, trying things like "inter-gender wrestling" and reading aloud from The Great Gatsby for an hour or more. The main point of the film is Kaufman's strange sense of humor. He constantly kept friends and fans guessing because one never knew exactly when Andy was pulling a gag or being serious.
He even developed an alter ego of sorts, a rude and obnoxious lounge singer named Tony Clifton, and would often retreat into the Clifton persona for days on end. He'd only answer if people referred to him as "Tony," and yet he denied that he was Clifton, hiring Bob Zmuda (Private Parts' Paul Giamatti) to play Clifton occasionally, so he could appear alongside "Clifton." Zmuda was also his accomplice in his biggest stunt, getting into big-time professional wrestling and having a long-standing feud with ring legend Jerry "The King" Lawler (playing himself). By blurring reality so often, and so well, few people believed the news that Kaufman was diagnosed with cancer. When he broke the news to his live-in girlfriend Lynne Margulies (Courtney Love of The People vs. Larry Flynt), she immediately got angry with him for pulling another unfunny joke on her.
To this day, there are people, including Andy's closest friends, that still wonder if Kaufman is, in fact, dead. Others feel that the fact that people don't believe he is gone is yet another testimony to his humor, and that Andy would love laughing at those non-believers, because he got away with one last joke.
What can I say about this movie, though, that doesn't focus on the performance of Jim Carrey as Kaufman? If you ever saw Andy perform, even just on "Taxi", you'll be stunned by Carrey's complete immersion in the role. He looks like Andy, he sounds like Andy, and he moves like Andy. If you believe press reports, he literally became Andy on the set, not answering to his own name and never breaking character. There's none of the persona we know as Jim Carrey here; it's totally Andy Kaufman. The two are very much alike, and yet, worlds apart in style. The triumph of the performance though is that the styles merge into one, and within minutes of watching Carrey, you forget who he is, and completely accept him as Kaufman. It's a miraculous job of acting, one I hope gets the recognition it deserves.
And credit Forman, and writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, for building the role correctly. This film doesn't make Kaufman out to be some sugary, smiling imp that nobody really understood. They show Andy for what he was, the good, the bad, and the ugly. These three were also the team behind The People vs. Larry Flynt, another biopic about a guy you almost loved to hate, and yet, you find yourself liking him. And Milos Forman doesn't allow the movie to make him a complete hero, either. There are plenty of people that hated Kaufman, and we see exactly why it was easy to despise him. But, again, nobody knows if that's not what Kaufman was trying to do, make people hate him as well as love him.
Give Milos a hand too, for building a supporting cast that could bolster the job Carrey does without stealing his thunder. Courtney Love is working in her second Forman film, and, while her role is not nearly as good here as it was in Flynt, it's not supposed to be. DeVito and Giamatti do admirable work as the "clean-up crew" for Kaufman, dealing with the aftermath of whatever Andy decided would be his next adventure, whether it was getting the tar smacked out of himself in a Memphis wrestling ring or buying milk and cookies for an entire audience at Carnegie Hall.
For a man that was fascinated by the relationship between the performer and his audience, this movie is even more interesting to watch. Andy believed that a performer is never sure how an audience feels about his work unless they hate him. As you sit and watch this movie, you find yourself riding the same rollercoaster that those closest to him felt. Why did he do all these insane things? Why was he constantly trying to see how much he could get away with? And why do we like him at all? You can't help but like a man who got away with these incredible con jobs. Maybe Andy was the consummate con man. He conned the world into believing he was crazy, when he actually knew exactly what he was doing.
Folks, get to a theatre and see Man on the Moon. You might get some insight into one of the most enigmatic performers of our generation, but, more importantly, you'll see once and for all that Jim Carrey is infinitely more talented than most people say. If the Academy ignores him completely this year, like they did last year, it'll only prove that, if ignorance is bliss, Oscar® voters are the most blissful people around.
Image copyright Universal Pictures.
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