"a song and dance man."

Rating: 7/10 (2 April 2000)

When Kaufman was alive I had a sort of love-hate response to his material. As I'm sure many did. Needless to say I also have a love-hate response to this film. We were not in on the joke, those of us who were exposed to the real Andy Kaufman. This movie tries to demystify the perplexity that was Andy Kaufman. It tries to humble his stature while simultaneously praising him as if he were a gift to modern comedy and humanity. He was not. He was a selfish performer with a delinquent obsession for mischief. Any entertainment we got from him was despite his own efforts.

He was a talented man, but many stand greater than he: Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Burns, Jonathan Winters, Bill Cosby, the list goes on. In a way the movie stands almost as an apology: "He was only kidding, folks!" and I wonder if that apology should be accepted, or even uttered. It's like trying to explain the joke after the punchline illicits no laughter. It demeans the attempt and makes the joke even worse.
Kaufman was an entertainer interested in the interactions between performer and audience. He wasn't satisfied with just making people laugh. He also wanted to make us cry. He wanted to scare us. He wanted to inspire us to throw things at him and shout obscenities, and he wanted to be able to control his audience on all emotional levels. In that, he was successful.

He would read The Great Gatsby to a crowd, not to entertain them, but to see how long it would take before they would all get up and leave. He wanted to see how much the audience would take of him. The audience was there to entertain him.
He wanted to be known as a song and dance man. Fine. I'll call him that. However, he was no comedian. Comedians generally focus on trying to make an audience laugh. Kaufman preferred to see his audience as the butt of jokes for his own amusement. We were his entertainment. It was not the other way around.
Should we laud him for it? Should we praise him for it? And should we make expensive movies about him when his corpse is hardly cold? As sincere and heartfelt as this movie wants to be, it is somehow unfitting to speak this way of the dead. And y'know what? That's probably exactly how Andy would have wanted it.
The special guest appearances are enigmatic for me. Surely there's stories behind closed doors with Danny DeVito convincing some of them - stories we will never hear. Perhaps after DeVito is dead we'll see another movie about it.
Jim Carrey's performance was impeccable. Naturally he was completely snubbed by the Academy and was not even nominated for an Oscar. Like Kaufman, Hollywood still doesn't quite know what to do with Carrey. If you like Carrey, this is a mustsee film. If you don't like Carrey, this film might just change your mind.
DeVito's performance is underwhelming. His attention was diverted, and he would have been better suited staying behind the camera and concentrating on looking through the lens. DeVito wore too many hats for this one and it shows in his performance.
I've seen documentaries about Kaufman that were just as entertaining and revealing. I enjoyed it, but I did so despite myself. I think the most powerful moment is the scene just before the funeral. For a film in which I already knew all the major plot points and I knew how it would end, the look on Carrey/Kaufman's face when he realized that the cruelest joke of life was on him, that alone was worth the price of admission.