Milos Forman (1999)

There are two reasons why it doesn’t pay to know too much about Andy Kaufman, the American comedian whose life and work are the subject of Man on the Moon. First, Kaufman was notorious for disorienting his audiences – they were never sure of the extent to which his increasingly outré performances were a put-on. Kaufman developed this kidology to such an extent that, when he died in 1984 at the age of thirty-five, there were people – fans and non-fans – who thought this was his biggest hoax yet. A lack of familiarity with Kaufman’s comedy allows you to experience it as if you were part of the original audience. Second, you don’t judge the actor playing Kaufman according to the accuracy of his impersonation. You can therefore be absorbed by Jim Carrey’s portrait of Kaufman as you’re watching the film even though you need watch only a few minutes of the original on YouTube afterwards to be reminded how very different he was.

Working from a screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, Milos Forman puts the is-this-for-real and art-imitating-life themes at the centre of Man on the Moon. To British audiences, Kaufman is probably better known as Latka Gravas in Taxi than for his appearances on Saturday Night Live or for any of his more subversive work on American television or as a stand-up in clubs. (Kaufman hated the idea of being in a sitcom and though he stayed in Taxi from 1978 until 1983 he negotiated successfully with ABC to have Latka suffer from multiple personality disorder to allow him to create other characters from time to time.) The scenes on the television set in the movie are peopled by members of the sitcom’s original cast, twenty years older than when they actually appeared in Taxi – Judd Hirsch, Carol Kane, Christopher Lloyd. Danny DeVito, another member of the original Taxi cast, plays Kaufman’s manager George Shapiro in Man on the Moon. The real David Letterman and Merv Griffin are there in sequences that reconstruct outrageous appearances by Kaufman on their talk shows. According to Wikipedia, ‘Many of Kaufman’s real life friends and co-stars also appear in the film (although not all as themselves) …’

The casting and presence of Jim Carrey are integral to the true-or-false conception of the movie. Carrey is a performer whose comic dynamism is unarguable but whose showmanship – the superabundance of energy, the facial and gestural exaggerations, the toothpaste grin verging on a self-satisfied smirk – many people can’t stand or, at least, take as evidence of Carrey’s hollowness. His personality on screen is very different from that of the man he’s playing here. As a Letterman guest in a YouTube clip, Andy Kaufman is anything but hyperactive – his comic radicalism is filtered through an apparently introverted persona. This is true even in the case of his principal alter ego Tony Clifton, a talentless lounge singer who relentlessly abuses his audience. Carrey’s Tony is deep in prosthetic make-up and crummy disguise – dark glasses and moustache as well as a wig much worse than the one Kaufman wears as Tony. In Pauline Kael’s last interview with Francis Davis in Afterglow, they discuss the film (they both think it’s bad) and Davis makes the point that Carrey’s Kaufman wants to be liked whereas the real Kaufman didn’t. (This echoes Kael’s own criticism of Dustin Hoffman’s Lenny Bruce twenty-five years earlier.) I don’t agree. As a performer, Carrey is so comically frenetic that he often looks to be daring the audience not to find him funny – whether we like him or not is secondary. I don’t think he suggests anything different playing Kaufman. It’s true, though, that Carrey seems highly aware not only of the camera but of people watching him, whereas Kaufman doesn’t obviously seem to care what the audience thinks or feels at all.

Yet Jim Carrey’s drawing on his own comic personality is part of what makes his portrait of Andy Kaufman fascinating. Carrey’s approach is daring because it doesn’t result in his showing us what Kaufman was really like – and because those who see Jim Carrey as shallow through and through (there are times when I’m one of them) may well feel vindicated. There’s an extraordinary moment when Andy warns his loving girlfriend Lynne Margulies (well played by Courtney Love) that ‘You don’t know the real me’ and she replies, ‘There is no real you’. ‘Oh, yeah,’ says Andy, ‘I forgot’. Jim Carrey looks like he means what he says but there’s nothing behind his eyes. Carrey has to discipline himself in Man on the Moon. It goes against the grain with him not to strain to be funny yet he has no option, in doing some of Kaufman’s routines, but to leave his audience baffled and unsmiling. It’s difficult eventually to say how successful Carrey is in the role – he may be unfunny more often than he needs to be – but this enigma strengthens the film. It feels richer for the fact that the question of whether Carrey ‘gets’ Andy Kaufman and the question of who Kaufman was both remain unresolved.

In other respects, Man on the Moon is crude in conveying Kaufman’s comic singularity. Each time he tries something new, the faces of his impro club or TV studio audience look not only bewildered but hostile – they make you wonder how Kaufman has built up any following when no one seems to be on his wavelength. Kaufman has comic collaborators and kindred spirits – notably Bob Zmuda (Paul Giamatti) – but Milos Forman minimises the opportunities for us to feel that: he’s at pains to make Kaufman as personally isolated as possible. Andy’s well-meaning, middle-class parents (Gerry Becker and Leslie Lyles) are characterised as decidedly square from the opening scene (when Andy is a child, performing to himself in his bedroom, then to his kid sister) yet they dutifully support their son, whatever he does. This comes across as a lazy caricature of achievement-hungry Jewish parents. Needless to say, the parents are repeatedly distressed by their son’s appetite for offensiveness but, since that goes for pretty well everyone else we see on screen, it doesn’t make the Kaufmans distinctively antediluvian. The film’s title refers to the REM song about Andy Kaufman, which is played over the closing credits.

5 June 2012