Not So Much a Celebration of Any Comic Figure as a Portrait of One's Passionate Agenda and Pursuit of It Until the End, No Matter How Strange It Was

Rating: 9/10 (26 October 2009)

What is most important about the effect of this film is that it stays faithful to Andy Kaufman's intractable conception. Oh, it polishes things up slightly. Indeed, "all the most important things in my life are changed around and mixed up for dramatic purposes," Kaufman tells us directly at the ingenious beginning, which is a brilliant tone-setter. Yet fundamentally it remains allegiant to his personage: A guy who would try you, lie to you and orchestrate laborious tricks and facades. The movie doesn't manufacture him into a tender, misread guy. And it doesn't grovel for laughs. When something is not working in Kaufman's act, it's not working in the movie, either, and it's not funny but excruciating.
Written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karascewski, the same writing team who penned Tim Burton's similarly visceral biopic of another obsessively off-kilter aspiring artisan, Ed Wood, this nuanced film has a monumental performance from Jim Carrey, who auspiciously vanishes within the character of Andy Kaufman. Carrey is as big a star as Hollywood has, and still rather early in Milos Forman's eighth American movie, we forget who is playing Kaufman and become enmeshed in what is happening to him. Carrey is himself an obsessive performer who will do anything to get a laugh, who wants to amuse, whose veneer is zany and saccharine. That he can extract the intricacies of Kaufman's comedic misery is quite awe- inspiring. That he can quench his own compulsion to kowtow takes a sort of maturity nobody expected out of Ace Ventura. Not only is he working without his own buffer, he's playing a guy who didn't know what that even was.
The film, written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, begins with Kaufman as a vexatious child in his room, declining to go out and play, preferring to host his own TV variety program for the cameras he perceived to be concealed in his bedroom walls. His material was compelled by poor nightclub and lounge acts. He understood that a live performance is seldom more intriguing than when it is going wrong.
This highly creative, admirably relentless movie, which because people are stupid ended the then nearly decade-long succession of Jim Carrey movies that had very successful opening nights, follows Kaufman into the L.A. standup circuit, where a talent manager played by real- life former Kaufman co-star Danny DeVito, sees something in his act and signs him. Kaufman is soon a sitcom star, a regular on Taxi. He presses for "guest bookings'' for his "protege,'' a hilariously repugnant lounge act named Tony Clifton, who is played behind seamless makeup by Kaufman and sometimes by his accomplice Bob Zmuda. Kaufman steadfastly refuses to admit he is Clifton, and in a way, he isn't.