Jim et Andy

Andy Kaufman offered a hilarious - and sometimes disturbing - reflection on comedy, celebrity, and being human. Then Jim Carrey became Andy Kaufman...and everything started all over again. This film is so much more than interviews and lost footage. It is a meditation on fame. Even more, it is a meditation on the thin line between make believe and reality. There's something to learn in the space between.

The film covers Jim a lot more than Andy. It certainly makes an impact. They are both very complicated people and it becomes clear that if anyone was going to play Andy Kaufman it had to be Jim Carrey. He got about as close as anyone ever could.

In the interview sections Jim comes across charming and occasionally says some very profound and insightful things. The on set footage shows a very different person. He chose to approach the role as a hardcore method actor. Insisting on being called his characters names and never breaking character, even around Andy's family. Some of it is brutal and hard to watch. He is nothing short of an obnoxious, unhinged, tempormental nightmare. Especially when he plays Tony. There are many times when I feel sorry for the crew and his costars. Outside of the craft of acting there is a serious case to be made for Carrey being committed. He seems legitimately insane. That being said so did Andy and maybe Jim had to do that in order to temporarily become him.

The only fault I can identify with Jim's performance is that there was a sweetness about Andy and his funny antics. There is a dark anger in Jim which occasionally leaks out. Still I think Jim got as close as anyone could to capturing Andy.

My overall impression is that Andy Kaufman was a strange and beautiful performance artist. Jim Carrey is brilliant and troubled actor. I love watching his movies, but, I probably would not want to work with him.

Few things get me more emotional than Andy Kaufman. Even hearing a few words of R.E.M.'s "Man on the Moon" makes my eyes well up. I remember watching his early appearances live on Saturday Night Live and the night he got into a fist fight on Fridays. And while I was alive for his descent into pro wrestling mania and his battle with cancer, I don't remember much of the end. Maybe I didn't want to process it. Maybe that's why I believed — to this day — that Andy is just waiting to pull the curtain back on all of us and come back. And maybe not coming back? Perhaps that's his best trick of all.

Conversely, I've never liked Jim Carrey. Unlike Andy, who undermined his own popularity and resisted the mainstream while simultaneously making a living from it, he seemed too eager to please. Too happy to take and take from the blockbuster machine, to be in works that didn't challenge him. That's why The Cable Guy surprised me. Here as the buffoon who mugged his way through Dumb and Dumber forcing viewers to contemplate the pain behind the character. He followed that movie with later challenging films like The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The Jim Carrey that appears here is not the rubber-faced maniac who seemed to cry out, "Watch me! Love me!" This is a graying, faded, bearded, rougher man who has been through no small degree of personal loss and pain. And this is also a man who willingly gave his identity over to not just Andy Kaufman, but to Andy's more frightening side, the villainous Tony Clifton.

In a recent Newsweek article, Kaufman's sister gives some insight: "I think that Jim Carrey was a vessel," she said. " I do believe he allowed Andy to come through him. I also chose to believe that Andy was coming through him. When he looked at me, I'm not kidding. It was like speaking to Andy from the great beyond. I felt like he was coming through as the evolved, astral Andy."

I've watched Milos Forman's Man on the Moon numerous times. And I've read plenty of books, digested plenty of articles and watched every appearance Andy did on TV. I look to him in the way that I extend to few performers: he's more of a truth-speaking prophet than just a person. Do I give him too much credit? Do I see things in him, do I project magic that he wasn't able to perform? I think — I fervently believe — that he was something more. A force. Someone who was able to push buttons, upset people and be a real-life wrestling heel while at the same time delivering childlike moments of whimsy and wonder. Just the footage of him inviting everyone to join him for milk and cookies after his Carnegie Hall performance makes me weep openly. It feels too real, too loving, too honest and much too true.

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A great document of a man who is suffering. What happens if you aren't content after achieving all your dreams?

As impressive as Jim Carrey's immersion of himself into Andy Kaufman was, the real star of this show to me was his own philosophizing over the stages of his life, and the segments we see of his career. On top of all his other talents, Carrey is one thoughtful, profound guy. It ties in beautifully though - Kaufman, a performer who always seemed be putting on an act and doing weird, absurd things, and Carrey, method acting as the guy who put on act, taking on a pro wrestler who also regularly put on act. It all blurs together, causing us to question the nature of things, e.g. what's real and what's entertainment, maybe showing how Kaufman broke a few barriers in that way. I would have loved to have seen even more of Jim Carrey and less of Tony Clifton, an annoying character who reminded me of a takeoff on Jerry Lewis's Buddy Love, and in any event, not all that pleasant. Still though, this is quite a thought-provoking documentary, and one to check out.

Quote, Jim Carrey on The Truman Show and real life: "I've stepped through the door, and the door is the realization that this, us, is Seaside. It's the dome, this is the dome. This isn't real. This is a story. There is the avatar you create, and the cadence you come up with, that is pleasing to people, and takes them away from their issues, and it makes you popular, and then at some point you have to peel it away. And, you know, it's not who you are. At some point you have to live, you know, your true man. You know Truman Show really became a prophecy for me. It is constantly reaffirming itself as a teaching almost, as a real representation of what I've gone through in my career, and what everyone goes through when they create themselves, you know, to be popular or successful. And it's not just show business. It's Wall Street, it's anywhere. You go to the office and you put a monkey suit on, and you act a certain way, say a certain thing, and lie through your teeth at times, and you do whatever you need to do to look like a winner, you know. And at some point of your life, you have to go, I don't care what it looks like. You know, I found the hole in the psyche and I'm going through, and I'm going to face the abyss of not knowing whether that's going to be okay with everybody or not, you know. And at times, just like the movie, they try to drown you in the middle of that abyss. They go, 'No, be the other guy. You told us you were this guy. You told us you were Andy. You told us you were Tony Clifton.' You know, no one can live with that forever."