"I wanna be the biggest star in the world."

Rating: 8/10 (21 May 2018)

The more time that passes by, the more it seems like Andy Kaufman was a fictional character. I never did warm up to Kaufman as a performer, although I did enjoy his character Latka Gravas on 'Taxi'. One of the impressive things about this movie is that all of the cast members of that show lent their talents in telling the story of his life, or at least the highlights of that story. The only one missing from the set of the 'Taxi' cast was Danny DeVito, who appears in the picture as talent agent and Kaufman's handler, George Shapiro. It was striking for me to remember most of what appears in the story since I got it all piecemeal throughout the late Seventies and early Eighties when Kaufman was making his mark in the entertainment world. Oddly, I recall seeing Kaufman on his Saturday Night Live debut and thought his Mighty Mouse sketch was hilarious. And even while it was happening, I knew all that business about the 'intergender wrestlling' had to be a 'work', to use the profession's own terminology. The infamous Jerry Lawler slap that sent Andy sprawling on the set of the Letterman Show caught me off guard and looked so realistic that for a moment I had my doubts whether there was any acting involved, but that was put to rest in the movie. Portraying Kaufman, Jim Carrey does a splendid job and if you never saw Kaufman live, Carrey would pass as a reasonable substitute. The only thing the film doesn't do is give one any kind of sense of whether the real Andy Kaufman ever came across as an average human being. But maybe that's a moot point, as his entire life seemed to be a kind of 'work' that made normalcy something out of the ordinary.