Review: Man on the Moon

Did you hear about this one? About Andy Kaufman, the comic for whom laughter was beside the point? The one who wanted to see how far he could take the joke, the one who blurred the line between what was real and what was staged and didn't let the audience in on the joke? "Who are you trying to entertain?" his oft put-upon manager George Shapiro (Danny DeVito) asks in Milos Forman's brilliant biopic Man on the Moon. "The audience or yourself?" The answer may be both.

The film begins in a sequence Kaufman would have approved of. "Hello, I am Andy and I would like to thank you for coming to my movie," he says in his foreign man character. "I wish it was better…it's so stupid." He goes on to say that he's taken all the baloney out so the movie is "much shorter. In fact, this is the end of the movie." He's not kidding. The end credits roll and he stares at us with both discomfort and frozen frustration as we keep sitting in the theater. After several minutes, the screen goes black…and stays black until Andy peeks out from one side of the frame. "Wow, you're still here," he says in his normal voice. "I just did that to get rid of folks who wouldn't understand me."

The real film then begins but Forman isn't out to understand Andy in the usual way. A recent segment of MSNBC's Headliners and Legends, for example, pinpointed the death of Andy's grandfather as the origin for his brand of subversive comedy. Andy, disillusioned with the obtuse way he was told about his beloved grandfather's death, presumably decided that he, too, could play with reality. The world was a show for him to create situations in and its inhabitants, whether an actual audience or unwitting bystanders, would always watch. Thus, Andy was always on. "You don't know the real me," he tells girlfriend Lynne Margulies (Courtney Love). "There isn't a real you," she jokes. "Oh, yeah, I forgot," he replies. That's about as much psychological exploration Forman and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, The People Vs. Larry Flynt) do.

What the trio is after is this: through Andy's performances and various alter egos, maybe - just maybe, there was the real Andy. Or maybe, there was no one to see. He challenged the audience to walk the line with him by baiting them with Latka Gravas, the unidentifiably foreign and undeniably charming Taxi character everyone fell in love with. Kaufman was dead set against being a sitcom star - he thought the sitcom to be the lowest form of entertainment and despised the canned laughter - but if ABC wanted him, then he'd play his tricks on them as well. It was, as his partner in crime Bob Zmuda (Paul Giamatti) convinced him, a means to an end: "You can make them love you now and later…you can fuck with their heads."

Boy, did Andy ever! From his never aired TV special where he insisted on messing with the vertical hold ("People will think their TV is broken.") to his insistence on having off-putting lounge singer Tony Clifton guest on the sitcom to his stint as the Intergender Wrestling Champion, Andy was never happier than in tweaking people's expectations. He loved to rile up the crowd and there's one moment during his needling of Jerry Lawler (the wrestler plays himself) where Jim Carrey, as Andy, delivers a fierce glint in his eyes. Andy senses the crowd is out for his blood and he's excited. Carrey, in that most subtle glance, lets us in on the joke.

"Is it an act? Is it an act?" Lynne asks. "Is this for real?" "What is the point?" George asks. The confusion is the point. Andy was getting and baring to people what they refused to see - that life was a series of illusions and that people may present themselves as Latka to mask the Tony Cliftons underneath. Before anybody else, he got that wrestling was entertainment, that reality could be staged (as Jerry Springer and his ilk can attest). Andy was a genius and an iconoclast -- Man on the Moon acknowledges him but doesn't revere him too greatly. Andy was weird, the film says, Andy might have even been crazy. Love him or hate him, he got under your skin.

Carrey famously immersed himself in the role - it's been widely reported that he insisted on being Andy between takes - and his embodiment of Kaufman is spot on. Watching Carrey lose himself in Kaufman, you sense that he somehow understands what made Andy tick, that he has tapped into Andy's Rosebud. His finest moment arrives when Andy, weakened from a rare form of lung cancer that would kill him, travels to the Philippines for a miracle cure. As he realizes that it's a hoax, Carrey laughs - it's a laugh of recognition, one illusionist acknowledging another, and also a laugh at the irony of it: the master of put-ons has had one put over on him.

Man on the Moon

Directed by: Milos Forman

Written by: Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski

Starring: Jim Carrey, Courtney Love, Danny DeVito, Paul Giamatti