Levels

I recently watched Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond on Netflix.  It's a documentary about the making of Man On The Moon--the Andy Kaufman biopic starring Jim Carrey.  But Jim & Andy is more than that.

Much of it is taken from footage shot on the set of the movie, almost 20 years ago, that has never been released.  In it, it seems as if the spirit of Kaufman, and worse, the spirit of Kaufman's nasty alter-ego Tony Clifton, have taken over Carrey.

Kaufman himself was always pretending to be someone else, and taking it further than anyone else ever had in comedy.  He was more a performance artist than a standup. 

I don't think Man On The Moon really captures Kaufman. Yes, it shows his performances, wonderfully recreated by Carrey, but it's too literal, and ploddingly directed (by Milos Forman) with too many shots of the squares in the audience not getting it.  It never captures any inner life--how he got this way, why he kept doing it.

For one thing (and you might not get this from the movie), Kaufman knew what he was doing.  He was canny.  You don't work your way up through the business over the years, getting on the Johnny Carson show and Saturday Night Live, without ambition and understanding what plays with a crowd.

And by the way, the audience, for the most part, got him.  They knew it was a put-on, and enjoyed the show.  True, plenty didn't especially care for Kaufman's comedy--he was the sort of "hip" act that turned some off--but he was able to carve out a career because he connected.  He died very young, only 35 (so naturally people thought it was a hoax), and who knows if he could have kept it up at the same level.

In many ways, the documentary of Carrey submerging himself in Andy Kaufman is better than the film they made.  Carrey truly seems to have lost himself.  Director Forman seems to have trouble corralling him. Of course, at this point, Carrey was gigantic, and had to be indulged.  In 1994 he'd become an overnight star (after years of working on it) with three big hits, Ace Ventura, The Mask and Dumb And Dumber.  By the time he got to Man In The Moon, he was still riding high--the film didn't do that well, incidently, breaking his streak.

Jim & Andy is also interspersed with a present-day interview of Carrey that's weird in itself.  He comments on how he felt back then, but it's not entirely clear where he--much older and no longer the star he was--is at today.

So you've got an older man with an odd perspective looking back on lost footage of an actor famous for impressions losing himself in a character or two based on a person who confused reality with fiction as a norm.

Weird, man.

PS  I just checked and both Kaufman and Carrey were born on January 17th.  Someone should have mentioned that.