Carrey in his best role but what was the point?

Rating: 2/10 (24 March 2005)

Jim Carrey can be the most funny person alive and the most scary. His high-octane performances are something that you just can't ignore and I'm talking of both his comic and dramatic performances.
Like so many have commented on here is that Carrey is Andy Kauffman here, not just playing him. If you read my commentary on Taxi I was one of the people who didn't get Kauffman at all. He took risks of course but if you are to judge him from this movie you would come up empty. I know, that some would say that was the whole point but if you just wanna make a superficial examination of a person's character then you'd better make it a lot more entertaining than this. His start at the comedy clubs as it is shown here are highly suspect of course but why would any agent sign him on the spot without much to go on. His act can only be described as juvenile and maybe I'm wrong but agents are not that undiscriminating. There had to be more to him.
The decision to play out Kauffman's acts as simply elaborate hoaxes may be brilliant but it gets rather tiresome after you have seen it two or three times and it is done to death in this movie. It's not that I mind being tricked but it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth to see that Kauffman cared more about himself than his audience and we are supposed to think that he was great because of that. The Bob Zmuda character is also a big problem. Many times I think of him as just a figment of the imagination, much like Kauffman's alter ego Tony Clifton. He doesn't seem to be that important to Kauffman, neither as a friend or a co-conspirator. Then we have Courtney Love's character, Lynne. Total disappointment after her performance in The people vs. Larry Flynt. Maybe she just did this as a favor to Forman.
The death of Andy Kauffman was the most realistic part of the movie and the rather touching scene between De Vito and Carrey at the end is Oscar material. But doing a series of skits that are supposed to be a biography of any man's life is not what I would have preferred to see. Maybe someday they will finally give us a worthy biopic of say another actor like Bogart but even a mediocre one would be much more entertaining than this one.