Biopic about the ultimately tragic life of comedian Andy Kaufman, starring Jim Carrey in a performance which proved his talent as a...
Certificate
Duration113 mins
Review by
Jim Carrey takes the leading role in Milos Forman's 1999 biopic on cringe comedy performer Andy Kaufman. Forman's film is based on the events of Kaufman's career from a small "song and dance man" who gets fired from a bar in the beginning scene to leading comedy star playing in ABC's sitcom 'Taxi' as well as 'Saturday Night Live', a show that still airs today. Much like Kaufman's career, Jim Carrey's quite serious role in this film has arguably been a major highlight in his career thus far; the actor won his second, consecutive golden globe in a row. He won his first one for best actor in 1998 when he played the role of Truman Burbank in the critically acclaimed film 'Truman Show'. Because of the similarities between Carrey and Kaufman, their rise to fame from stand-up and their comedic styles, I felt the casting of Carrey was nothing less than astonishing. His performance certainly demonstrated this.
The film begins with a preliminary scene with Kaufman in character as - I guess judging by the accent- Lavka, his character in 'Taxi', talking directly to the camera trying to persuade the audience to leave the cinema and trying to re-set the record needle which rolls the credits. I found this to be creatively funny while giving a great insight into Kaufman as a comedy genius and a real talent. The equilibrium depicts Kaufman as a zero talented singer performing in bars until he is eventually thrown out of one. He keeps going through from bar to bar, as a flashback to his childhood tells us his dream has always been to become a performer. But in that scene, Kaufman doesn't have/want an audience; he doesn't want to play outside either. These two insights were key to his self-destruction towards the end of his career because he, as his mentor (played by Danny DeVito) points out, was only performing for himself and was continually trying to break down the walls between the viewer and the comedy. Kaufman's comedy was always about a joke played on the audience - a sort of anti-comedy, the antagonists throughout the film were the network owners and corporate bosses, whom Andy tries to rally against by sabotaging sets, abandoning scripts e.t.c
But before he was an actor he is still this 'song and dance guy' until one day when he catches the eye of talent agents George Shapiro and with rapid speed is signed to a five-year contract with ABC network. However, before long Kaufman becomes fed-up with his role in a well-staged sitcom called 'Taxi' and takes to other performances: He creates an antagonist character called Tony Clifton Kaufman's alter-ego whom Kaufman wants to co-star on Taxi to sabotage it (and succeeds when the director not knowing that Clifton is Kaufman fires Clifton) and other stand-up comedy performances. Surely that's enough to entice anyone to watch Man on the Moon, but of course, in my opinion, there were some issues that warranted only a mediocre rating of 3 stars. I felt that the narrative was a bit forceful and hard to follow, admittedly it was disappointing because of this, and to my knowledge at least, the film did not follow the common three stage narrative and the narrative was left unresolved. Although IT IS a biopic, I felt that the narrative focused too much on Andy and it soon got really boring.
That aside, I do think that Carrey was hilarious as always as well as the other stars Courtney Love and Danny DeVito, so I would recommend it to any Carrey fan or Kaufman fan for that matter, and anyone who has a sense of humour. However one would have to pay a great deal of attention to the narrative so as not to quickly get bored or confused.