Milos still manages to make Burbank look like Prague

Rating: Null/10 (23 December 1999)

This biopic of the situationist anti-comedian Andy Kaufman isn't much; the unjustly decorated director Milos Forman doesn't appear to have contributed much to it except a bevy of painfully obvious, point-making reaction shots seen against Kaufman's dada stand-up. The great pleasure of the movie, though, is that it's mostly a series of Kaufman bits--he did this routine, then this one, then that one--impersonated and taken to the next level by a career-high Jim Carrey. The kicker is not that Carrey nailed Kaufman's funny-voice personae--you saw that coming--but how beautifully he nails the stony, beatific, bland "real" Andy voice. It's the kind of Rich Little performance that kicks the butt of nine out of ten "transformative" Method performances. Carrey's bits as Tony Clifton, Kaufman's Vegas-scumbag persona, are the funniest minutes of film seen this year.
The screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, having put the heads of Ed Wood and Larry Flynt on their living-room wall, went once over lightly on Andy Kaufman; their other biopics are screwy, ironic takes on the genre. Perhaps seeing the way Forman steamrollered their brilliant LARRY FLYNT script, turning an NC-17 RAISING ARIZONA into a swollen, Oscar-jerking tract about freedom of expression, they seem to have lazily just given the Czech genius what he wanted--boilerplate biopic stuff. ("You are insane, Andy...but you just might be brilliant!") And every moment involving the grotesque un-actor Courtney Love as Andy's designated arm candy is deadly dull. But the movie is a Carreython, and it succeeds better at mining his talents--his scrupulous mimicry and his fiendish commitment to the extreme--than any of his more mainstream vehicley movies. How strange that the most attention- and love-demanding movie star of modern times could so well understand a diffident performance artist who never cared whether the audience would walk out. Wags will compare MAN ON THE MOON to the "pious" and "hagiographic" (and actually quite brilliant) Bob Fosse treatment of Lenny Bruce, but no matter: the movie is an anthology of performance moments, and it has a public-service value as a reminder to a young generation of one of the last moments when it was possible to be both deeply transgressive and a pop-culture figure your mom has heard of at the same time.