Man on the Moon

Man on the Moon

This is one of those movies that's been on my list for years but I just never found the right time to watch it. What did finally get me to sit down and watch is probably what got most other people to finally watch it: the new documentary on Netflix, Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond, which I have not seen yet but very much want to.

This movie hits a couple different weird like/dislike buttons for me, which isn't really fair from an objective perspective but I have to be honest about how this movie made me feel. I love Andy Kaufman, I've been a fan of his since I first got into watching stand up in middle school. He took the Steve Martin and Albert Brooks brand of comedy-making-fun-of-comedy and elevated it to the idea that life itself is a joke. But I also feel like people forget to take a second from analyzing him to realize that he's also just funny. Like, really funny. I'm also a big fan of films about the entertainment industry; there's a certain meta quality to them that just appeals to me. However, I don't like this kind of biopic.

Obviously there's plenty of great biopics (Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Social Network, The Elephant Man, Ed Wood, Schindler's List, Steve Jobs, etc.), but those aren't what I'm talking about. It's the glossing-over-the-entire-life biopics that I tend to have a problem with. It's an overdone formula that's often associated with Oscar fodder, and rightfully so. Films like The Theory of Everything and Hidden Figures ring false to me because not only are they putting someone's actual life into a predictable story structure, but they're not doing anything unique in terms of visual storytelling. All of those great biopics I listed are executed brilliantly because of their screenplays, performances, and direction. These directors and writers had a clear vision, were passionate about that vision, and felt a personal connection to the material, regardless of whether or not they were based on a true story or a real person. But when a biopic is told in a plain, straightforward way (which unfortunately describes the majority of Man on the Moon), it feels less like a director's creative vision and more like a Wikipedia summary. But Man on the Moon still manages to stand out from a typical biopic because of both the inevitably interesting subject of Andy Kaufman, and Jim Carrey's dedication to the role.

If decades could be run by the monarchy system, then Jim Carrey would be the king of the 1990's. Ace Ventura, The Mask, Liar Liar, Batman Forever, the man was as unstoppable as the train in Unstoppable, but unlike the train in Unstoppable, which I'm assuming eventually stops in the end, he continued to not stop even at the end of the 1990's. Man on the Moon came out in 1999, making it pre-Eternal Sunshine Jim Carrey, so most people didn't know how sad Jim Carrey could make them, but it was also post-Truman Show Jim Carrey, which meant people knew he could at least make them kind of sad. But even with Truman Show under his belt, no one could have predicted how deeply Jim Carrey would dive into this role. With the screenwriters behind Ed Wood and the director behind Amadeus, one would assume that all he'd have to do is listen to the direction and say the words. But, both because the writers and director seemed fine with putting in a TV movie's amount of effort it in, and because it's a sort of inevitable part of the job description, Carrey really became Andy Kaufman. Now again, I haven't seen the documentary yet, but I can safely say that however insane he was on set, it completely pays off in this performance. While it may feel like everyone else is just cashing a check, this is Jim Carrey's Apocalypse Now. He is so committed to bringing back the Andy Kaufman experience that he very nearly brought him back for real. There's occasional Carrey-isms here and there, but the voice and the eyes are Kaufman's and only Kaufman's. The man was possessed.

The rest of the cast caused me to have a bit of a brain-melt. So if you've gotten this far in what I already feel like is a scatter-brained review, then please, take a walk with me:

They cast Danny DeVito as Greg Shapiro. Greg Shapiro is Kaufman's manager who got him his famous role in Taxi. Is it supposed to be funny that he's offering Andy Taxi because Danny DeVito was on Taxi? Because the rest of the cast of Taxi comes back to play themselves (even though they all clearly look 20 years older), but Danny DeVito doesn't. Even Lorne Michaels gets to play himself! So if everyone else who had a part in Andy's life got to play themselves, how did DeVito get stuck playing Shapiro? I know it's technically a bigger and better part, but how could they not know that would be confusing? It's also weird because Vincent Schiavelli is in the film, and he, DeVito, and Christopher Lloyd were all in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which was also directed by Milos Forman. Are these dots supposed to be connected? Is this supposed to be a treat for people in the know? Because I'm in the know and for me it's just very confusing. Also, Norm MacDonald plays Michael Richards in the infamous Fridays incident, but this movie was made right after Seinfeld and before the Laugh Factory breakdown so why couldn't Richards just play himself? Everyone else gets to! Except Danny DeVito!

There's also tiny cameos that really stick out if you know the actors, like Mary Lynn Rajskub and David Koechner, but the absolute weirdest is Patton Oswalt because for some reason they dress him up like Joe Dirt even though the guy he's at a table with gets to look normal. What's even weirder is that Courtney Love plays Andy's wife, because I had no idea it was her for the entire movie, either because she wasn't in her usual rocker attire or because I just chose to mentally block that it was her because she murdered Kurt Cobain. All of the supporting actors do a perfectly good job though, they just sort of wrinkled my brain (with the exception of Paul Giamatti, who is great as always and who's casting was not at all confusing to me).

I should probably be alarmed by how stressful I found these trivial details to be, but I'll skip to the "overall" portion of this review because I think everything's been made fairly clear in terms of my opinion. Jim Carrey has a brilliant, possible career-best performance in a pretty generic biopic that honestly feels more like an HBO movie than a theatrical release. It has some memorable moments, but those memorable moments are just recreations of real-life memorable moments that were far more interesting in real life, so I don't really know what anything is anymore. Maybe the documentary can make sense of all of this.