Strange and awesome

Rating: 8/10 (21 July 2012)

My first taste of avant-garde comedian Andy Kaufman was, while watching old episodes of Saturday Night Live, his Mighty Mouse bit he did for that show. I knew nothing about him at the time, and I still didn't know much about him until seeing this brilliant biopic about his life and career. Jim Carrey plays Kaufman in this Milos Forman directed flick that examines the controversial and confusing career that Kaufman had. It's full of lies, deceit, and publicity stunts that established his career as something of a great big farce. Andy Kaufman was a brilliant mind that very few could understand completely. What he did, he did for himself. He had huge aspirations to be incredibly famous, he just didn't know what to do in order to get there.
It's clear that the world of comedy has never seen anything quite like Andy Kaufman. It's hard to adequately explain just what his career was all about. It includes sitcoms, jazz singing, wrestling, and everything else you wouldn't expect it to have. But there was a bizarre brilliance to it all that translates throughout this film wonderfully. Watching the dramatized development of this strange career is as entertaining as it is fascinating. We never get an idea of why Kaufman does all that he does and no explanation is given as to why he is how he is. This somewhat breaks the ideals of what a biopic should be but, then again, nobody fully understood what Andy Kaufman was all about, so does a film really have the right to make that up? The biggest complaint I've seen about this film is that it focuses more on the career of Andy Kaufman rather than his personal life. There is undoubtedly some truth to this, but it's not something that bothered me. His career is what is interesting, and his career was so involved and it completely consumed his life so, in a way, his personal life was his career.
Man on the Moon is simply just a great film. It's not a perfect biopic, but a damn good one and it tells an incredibly interesting story about an incredibly interesting man. Jim Carrey absolutely owns his role as Kaufman and gives it his all in portraying the late genius. The film is more entertaining than it is heartfelt and it's more comedic than it is dramatic, but it possesses all of these elements in some degree. It's a bizarrely fun film to watch, uncomfortable at times but always pleasing, much in the same vein as the career of the strangely brilliant Andy Kaufman.