The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Rating: Null/10 (30 December 1999)

As a child, Andy Kaufman would perform make-believe TV shows in front of his bedroom wall because he believed his wall was his audience. Later in life, he would ask his Mahareshi what the secret was to being funny and the response came back to be silent  not the silence of absent sound but the silence of listening inwardly. Kaufman's world never became a world we could understand. Milos Foreman film, "A Man in The Moon", while well-acted and directed, doesn't try to explain why Kaufman did what he did. Instead it chronicles the several well-publicized events of Kaufman's brief stardom with a near perfect portrayal by Jim Carrey. So we see his stand-up routines ranging from the juvenile musical numbers to the Elvis impersonations, we see his infamous relationships with alter-ego Tony Clifton and wrestler Jerry Lawler, we see his supposed blow-ups' on Merv Griffin, David Letterman, and the Friday' shows, and we see his successful Carnegie Hall one-man engagement ending with the audience bussed to a hall for milk and cookies. But "A Man in the Moon" does not enlighten us to why a comic would push the envelope of his craft by performing as if he was still a boy, making mischief and not telling anyone about it, suffering and getting humiliated for the inward pleasure it derived. Why did the film bring back many members of the Taxi' TV series including Marilou Henner, Judd Hirsch, Jeff Conaway (for that matter, Danny Devito) and then merely use them as props instead of integrating their take on Kaufman into the film? Why did Kaufman's parents appear in largely non-speaking parts, again acting as props, when their dialogue would have been good source for explaining Kaufman's behavior. Was Andy Kaufman a good prankster, a good showman forever putting on an act, or was he truly a comic genius? "A Man in the Moon" suggest that he was all three. But ironically, by recreating Kaufman as well as he did, Jim Carrey, years from now, will be remembered as the Man in the Moon' with Andy Kaufman as an afterthought.