Enigma, my foot

Rating: 8/10 (23 September 2000)

Andy Kaufman's motivation isn't at all hard to understand. We've all had the desire to play practical jokes. We've all had the urge to say and do things that are, objectively speaking, funny, even though, and often because, we know that the humour will be invisible to everyone but ourselves. And it's obvious us all what a good practical joke requires: it requires that we shut up and let others work out for themselves what the joke is, whatever the cost of our silence. Andy Kaufman - the character portrayed in this film, at any rate - was simply someone who loved a certain kind of humour more than anything else in the world. You've heard stories about people who love, say, music, more than anything else in the world...? Well, this is no different; certainly no more mysterious.
Remember the moment when his agent says, "You have to ask yourself this question: who are you trying to entertain? The audience, or yourself?" Andy doesn't answer. But the answer he would have given, had he been in a mood to be honest, would have been, "Neither. I'm interested in creating situations that are, objectively speaking, amusing - even if audiences are unable to laugh at them - even if I MYSELF am unable to laugh at them."
That's why it was worthwhile for Milos Forman to come along, after the dust had settled, and make Kaufman's life into a movie. Some of the jokes are only visible to a God's-eye view.
I walked into the film pretty much prepared to loathe Kaufman (whose stuff I've never seen). Okay, the man probably had talent. He was a skilled artist, of a kind. Still: a skilled artist of almost any other kind would be more worthy of admiration. But Forman keeps his distance, and simply asks us to see a genuinely tragic story of a human being who is somehow easy to like and - to us, if not to the other characters in the film - perfectly transparent. (So much so that we have to wonder how it was possible for Kaufman's contemporary audiences not to know what was going on. Are Americans REALLY as dense as legend says they are? Maybe not; and anyway, Forman's frequent cut-away shots to the audience show a variety of different responses.)
I could have done without that postscript with Tony Clifton; but the Philippines stint, and the funeral sequence it dissolved into, were marvellous. Forman's best work since "Amadeus".