Now available on Netflix
Director: Chris Smith
Starring: Jim Carrey
Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton. Just soak in that title. Vice wants you to. Andy Kaufman would want you to. Probably. It’s a knowing joke, owing that you already have knowledge of what Tony Clifton is (which, at this point in 2017, would probably be exclusively from The Man on the Moon, rather than the primary source). And that’s kind of what this movie is – it’s a philosophical and skin crawling documentary which requires the reviewer to have watched Jim Carrey’s 1999 biopic about Andy Kaufman to enjoy watching this 2017 film. I did, and I thought it was fascinating.
In a movie inspired by the grey area of truth and prank, it’s hard not to look back on the documentary and wonder what was actually truthful. But I’ll risk playing the rube and take it at face value. The “setup” for why this movie is happening 18 years after the events it portrays is this: on the set of Man on the Moon, Universal Studios arranged to have an “Electronic Press Kit” (EPK), where a crew would film the behind-the-scenes stories to give to publicists, reviewers or have available on a new-fangled DVD extra. However, the typical studio approach to movies (an unstoppable force) met the beyond-method acting approach by Jim Carrey to get into Andy Kaufman’s fractured psyche (immovable object), and things got weird.
Carrey remained so deep in characters (as either Andy, Latka, or the titular Tony Clifton) that he nearly ruined the production. It’s hard not to feel more sympathetic for director / Carrey wrangler Milos Forman (who at this point already had multiple Academy Awards for all-time classics) than it is to feel inspired by the genius of Carrey’s dedication. His zany pranks (in character) include berating the film crew as the failed comedian Tony Clifton character, antagonizing the real life Jerry Lawler playing himself (who is just flabbergasted at the inauthenticity of it all – repeatedly saying him and Kaufman were friends in real life), demanding more takes as the Latka character while referring to Jim Carrey as a different person.
It’s skin crawlingly awkward, which can either by funny or hard to stomach, depending on taste. It’s also interesting that Carrey seems to be most drawn to the Tony Clifton character the most – he’s the most wanton and unpleasant version of a comic’s wrathful id. I couldn’t tell if that was a Jim thing, or a Vice documentary thing – maybe the Tony Clifton stuff just seemed the most Vice As Fuck thing about the original EPK filming. Tony Clifton even showed up to the premiere of this documentary. And that’s a… thing. I’m not sure why people, mostly of a previous generation, are particularly obsessed over the Tony character.
This footage was “allegedly” blocked from being made available by Universal for almost twenty years, because it would make Jim Carrey look like an asshole. Spoiler alert – it does. So you have this “punk rock” EPK (like a proto, celebrity-packed ”Jackass”), archival footage of the actual Andy Kaufman, archival footage of Jim Carrey’s career, and scenes directly from Man on the Moon. But I buried the lead – the star of this documentary is (unsurprisingly) Jim Carrey. But it’s modern day Jim Carrey with a who-gives-a-shit beard and leather jacket, brutally honest about his career and his life.
The bearded Jim Carrey interview takes up about half the running time of this documentary but I honestly could have watched two straight hours of it. It’s not that I found his near-nihilist take on life that eye-opening. Carrey and the film come off as that college kid who got high for the first time and tells you what life really is, MAN. It’s that Super Celebrity Jim Carrey is actually talking this near-nihilist stuff in a documentary that people will watch, about a 1999 movie that, in general, people kind of like. It is so bizarre – and so fascinating. His honesty is captivating – I’m not sure how much of this was known ahead of time, like his career-defining anecdote about the professional failure of his father – a gifted saxophonist in Toronto who gave up on his dream to raise his family, only to fail as an accountant. This is capped by Carrey learning that “you can fail at what you don’t love, so you might as well do what you love.” This topic brings Jim the closest to breaking his nothingness persona on-camera. The direct-to-camera interview of bearded Jim also made me re-contextualize his career.
Jim Carrey’s career is inextricably linked to the films I watched many times in my childhood and early adulthood. As a kid in the 1990’s, it was hard not to love and quote Carrey performances in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Dumb and Dumber, The Mask and Liar Liar – many of which, I owned on VHS. In this sweet spot of Jim’s career, he was earning $20 million a movie, and was dominating the monoculture in the same way as Tom Cruise – getting that big makes a celebrity not a person anymore but an institution (like, it’s hard to imagine Tom Cruise doing something like going to the bathroom or eating a sandwich). That’s why some of the most interesting stuff in this film is not even related to Kaufman, but something like an awful Arsenio Hall appearance, where he is playing a drunk character yelling “WHERE’S JAY?!?”, calls Hall a “black bastard” and then fakes swinging at the host, before collapsing on the ground to a pin-drop silent audience. Re-contextualizing the lifelong inspiration of Andy Kaufman, he seems like he was almost successful in spite of himself. After some of the most successful comedies of all time, he started making the classic turn to drama in fare like The Truman Show, Man of the Moon, The Majestic and eventually the sad-sack classic Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
One of his appearances that dominates my consciousness the most is his character at the 1999 MTV Movie Awards, accepting a Moon Man for best male performance. He came as a biker and asked the programming department to play more Foghat. It’s so weird and uncomfortable, but funny without being actually funny. At this point (summer of 1999), he was about to start filming Man on the Moon. All these appearances and the turn of his dramatic film career seem now all on the same continuum. Maybe everybody came to this realization before me, but it really happened for me, like right now after watching Jim & Andy. After that, I’ve come to the realization that Jim Carrey is supremely underrated. Comedy took him for granted and I think he may be a genius. As a monoculture, we all supremely underrated how difficult it is to make everyone laugh through sheer physical energy and physical comedy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xon9iUDtIA0
In the end, the movie is fascinating – the footage from 1999 is interesting, but not earth-shattering: knowing the extent of Carrey’s method acting, we all could have pretty much imagined all the hijinks that took place in 1999. I’m not sure the point of the documentary, other than the 1999 footage is now available, for whatever reason. The film seems to point to Andy Kaufman himself existing so that Jim Carrey could have a life changing experience. Maybe he did – that would be insane, but who knows, with the crazy Kaufman theories out there. The film is endlessly engrossing for me, but super superficial. But in that, I think Jim Carrey may have just given the best male performance of the year in this documentary. Also, this film makes me want to watch The Truman Show way more than Man on the Moon. I think that’s telling.
Is it Watchlist-worthy? Yes, but only if you’ve seen Man on the Moon already.
