Herald rating: * * *
Cast: Jim Carrey, Danny Devito, Courtney Love, Paul Giamatti
Director: Milos Forman
Rating: M (contains low-level offensive language)
Running time: 119 minutes
Opens: Now showing, Rialto cinemas
Review: Greg Dixon
It's probable that only three people in this country have heard of Andy Kaufman, alleged genius.
If you don't know
the name, then you might remember the American sitcom that took him from obscure comic to cult comic, Taxi.
Still don't recall? He was the mechanic from an obscure Eastern European country who wore white overalls and had a voice like he'd been sucking on a bottle of helium.
Some thought he was the star of the show. He was certainly the character you either loved or hated. That was, as it happened, Kaufman's point - and is clearly also the point made by director Milos Forman's biopic-cum-tribute (which is so late on cinema release here that it is already available on DVD).
Kaufman's line seemed to be this: the performer must provoke the audience. He did this by mounting elaborate hoaxes, big and small, on crowds large and little.
The trick, the cunning plan, was to distort the relationship between the performer and audience, to take the crowd in, to antagonise a lazy public.
That was Malcolm McLaren's gag too. The Sex Pistols, he's always claimed, were more about confrontation than the music.
Screenwriter Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski have decided that Kaufman thought so too, so Jim Carrey's Kaufman says his act was "just like punk rock."
That might well be revisionism. But Forman's Life of Kaufman is in many ways as confrontational, as much a hall of mirrors as the man himself is said to have been.
Man on the Moon does repeat, pay homage - and in some cases embroider - many of the comic's routines and public outrages (though Taxi is reduced to a montage, probably because it's well known). Time hasn't changed them, you either love or despise his antics.
Carrey, Hollywood's reigning rubber face, delivers a performance which deserves praise. He has studied and perfected every tic, every vocal nuance, and he truly disappears into character.
Yet Man on the Moon is strangely unengaging. With the lines blurred between fact and fiction, Kaufman and Carrey, reality and unreality, the man at the centre of the story remains an enigma, a clown without a true shape.
In a sense the film never really gets to the point. It is, much like Kaufman's life, a series of obscure attempts at self-amusement.
