It is difficult to convey in 2017 exactly how famous and dominant Jim Carrey was for much of the ’90s. The more important lesson is that nobody should. But the fact that this footage is airing now, almost 20 years later, feels like a tacit acknowledgement that he’s no longer a big enough star to get away with it. Carrey’s high jinks are mostly whimsical and never quite deplorable. Strip away the Kaufman mystique and the implied devotion to Serious Acting and you have a megastar behaving the way only a megastar is permitted to behave. It is possible to watch this film and feel very warmly toward both past and present Jim Carrey, but also conclude that he behaved terribly on the set of Man on the Moon in a way that likely did not improve the quality of that film, and still wouldn’t be justified even if it had. Jim & Andy’s resulting nesting-doll identity labyrinth is fascinating, and occasionally somewhat upsetting. Were they in on the joke? Were they the joke?Īdd Jim Carrey, a cartoon character of a real person making his play to be a Dramatic Actor by portraying a subversive tragic hero of a cartoon-character comedian hell-bent on blurring the lines between reality and surreality, and what you’ve got is-and this bears repeating-a lot to deal with. When Kaufman was on camera, his was the least-important face on camera: The magic happened as you read the faces of everyone else as they vacillated between delight and confusion and what sure seemed to be genuine rage, the border between those emotions electrifyingly fluid. Andy Kaufman was an easy-to-appreciate, harder-to-love comedy genius whose primary weapons were cognitive dissonance and profound discomfort-the audience’s discomfort, but also, usually, his fellow actors’ discomfort. This is a lot to deal with, mostly on purpose. And at some point you have to peel it away. There’s the avatar you create, the cadence you come up with that is pleasing to people and takes them away from their issues and makes you popular. The door is the realization that this, us, is seaside. Meanwhile, present-day Jim Carrey provides talking-head commentary that sometimes directly responds to this old footage, until it stops even trying to do that: (DeVito, through teeth gritted spiritually if not literally: “This is so bizarre. Carrey’s costars, from Danny DeVito to Paul Giamatti to a valiantly unfazed Courtney Love, suffered or at least politely winced accordingly. Basically, a camera crew followed Carrey around as he made Man on the Moon, adhering to the infamous Method-acting school by refusing to break character when portraying both Kaufman and Kaufman’s own famously boorish and loathsome alter ego, Tony Clifton.
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The full title of this documentary, which is directed by Chris Smith and premiered Friday, is Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond-Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton, which gives you some idea of the meta gymnastics on display here. The thing Carrey has just said, on-camera, to prompt the crazy-shit response off-camera is, “I wonder what would happen if I decided to just be Jesus.” And there sits modern-day Jim Carrey, with his grayed suave-werewolf beard and piercing stare, perfectly lucid and alluringly calm and frightfully intense.
The documentary is over the end-credits song (a warped version of R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon,” obviously) is already playing faintly in the background. “Wow, we got into some crazy shit there, man.” This bewildered voice comes from off-camera at the conclusion of Jim & Andy, the new Netflix documentary about the making of the 1999 Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon, which starred Jim Carrey at the dizzying height of his fame.
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