Effort+Ego=Mediocrity

Rating: 6/10 (24 December 1999)

I had very high hopes for MOTM considering Carrey's breakout in The Truman Show and Forman's history. I wanted to like this movie, but instead I was left with a technically superior film that had very little impact.

Carrey's performance is little more than mimcry. I looked for him to humanize Kauffman or to at least personalize him. Instead, he opts for impersonation. While the impersonation is dead on, I wanted to see more elements of the person inside of his caricatures. I know Carrey can do impressions from his stand up and sketch career, I wanted to see him act and to show naysayers that Truman wasn't a fluke.
The supporting cast particularly Devito and Giamatti grounded the film and gave it a soul. Love's proven her acting prowess before in Forman's People vs Larry Flynt, so I question why the director hamstringed her with a script that left her the most generic love interest since Minnie Driver in Good Will Hunting.
As for the soul searching query that was supposed to be at the heart of the movie: Was Kauffman a genius or a quack? Very little is done to establish this in the first hour of the movie. He's established as a person whose career was never really in his own control and was more a victim of circumstance. Attempts to get to this in the last half of the film fall short because of a lack of establishment.
Production values, cinematography, and the music are excellent as I would expect in a Forman picture, but they don't cover what I perceived as a lack of heart.