director
Milos Forman
screenwriters
Scott Alexander
Larry Karaszewski
producers
Danny DeVito
Michael Shamberg
Stacey Sher
cinematographer
Anastas N. Michos
music
R.E.M.
editors
Adam Boome
Lynzee Klingman
Christopher Tellefsen
cast
Jim Carrey (Andy Kaufman)
Danny DeVito (George Shapiro)
Courtney Love (Lynne Margulies)
Paul Giamatti (Bob Zmuda)
Vincent Schiavelli (Maynard Smith)
Jerry Lawler (Himself)
Peter Bonerz (Ed. Weinberger)
Richard Belzer (Himself)
Bob Zmuda (Jack Burns)
Caroline Rhea (Actress on 'Fridays')
Sydney Lassick (Crystal Healer)
Jeff Conaway (Himself)
Marilu Henner (Herself)
Judd Hirsch (Himself)
Carol Kane (Herself)
David Letterman (Himself)
Christopher Lloyd (Himself)
Norm Macdonald (Michael Richards)
Lorne Michaels (Himself)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 118m
u.s.
release: December 22,
1999
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official website
other milos
forman films
reviewed on this website:
- the
people vs. larry flynt
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Andy Kaufman has been dead
for fifteen years, and people are still waiting for him to come
back. In a way, of course, he never left, and in Man on the
Moon he borrows Jim Carrey's body for a while. Carrey is
among the dozens of comedians who worship Andy as a sort of found
object of comedic genius, a guru of transgression -- Kaufman
was always more of a comedian's comedian than an audience-pleaser.
Here, after all, was a man who quite intentionally bombed on
stage; sometimes he would snatch victory from the jaws of defeat
-- taking a hard left into some funny bit of business that let
the audience know he was "doing" a comedian bombing
-- and sometimes he would go down in flames. Kaufman's style
was as layered as an onion: You laughed (in disbelief, more often
than not) at the surface of what he was doing; you laughed at
the idea of someone actually doing this; you laughed at yourself
for sitting there watching it; finally, you laughed at, and with,
Kaufman for having the balls to treat the stage as his ongoing
lab experiment.
The genius of Man on the Moon is that it's an onion inside
an onion. How do you make a biopic about someone who had no "personal
life" -- a man to whom one character says, "There isn't
a real you"? Answer: You don't. Man on the Moon is
an anti-biopic, fully befitting Kaufman's brand of anti-comedy.
Some will inevitably call it merely a greatest-hits collection:
Here's Andy doing Mighty Mouse, here's Andy as Latka, here's
Andy's bleating lounge-singer alter ego Tony Clifton, here's
Andy wrestling women, here's Andy feuding with Jerry Lawler,
here's Andy dying. And on some level, that's exactly what it
is: Why are we sitting here watching a talented, original comedian
knock himself out impersonating another? We know all this
greatest-hits stuff, we've seen it dozens of times on Comedy
Central; we're here to learn things we didn't know. But
the movie, like Kaufman, gives you no more or less than what
it wants to give you. Man on the Moon can be seen, in
part, as Andy's final postmodern triumph: At the end of two hours,
we don't really "know" him any better than we did before.
Of course, most of the people who knew him for years could say
the same thing. He was, and is, unknowable; that was part of
his mystique and his style.
Yes, the movie slips us an insight here and there. Example: Kaufman's
whole women-wrestling thing, it turns out, was a fetish; he did
it primarily because it turned him on, and he wound up in bed
with a lot of his opponents after the show. (His pop-eyed charisma
was such that the women somehow agreed to sleep with him even
after he publicly defeated and humiliated them.) But factoids
like this are available in the two recent biographies published
about Kaufman: Bill Zehme's Lost in the Funhouse, and
Andy Kaufman Revealed by Kaufman's best friend and comedy
partner Bob Zmuda (played in the film by Paul Giamatti). What
Man on the Moon shows you, illustrating these factoids,
is that Kaufman's odd pleasures were inseparable from his act.
Whatever excited him, he would find some way to include in his
performance, whether or not it fit neatly or even comedically.
Self-indulgence often kills art; Kaufman transformed self-indulgence
into art.
After a clever opening that recalls the beginning of The Andy
Kaufman Special (aka Andy's Funhouse, Kaufman's long-lost
TV special recently unearthed on TV Land), the movie skims briskly
across Kaufman's life, a rise-and-fall epic telescoped into two
hours. If Man on the Moon has a flaw, it's that it's too
concise: An entire interesting movie could be made about Kaufman's
grudging six-year tour of duty on Taxi (where he was resented
and misunderstood by most of the cast), or about his wrestling
period, which even his steadfast fans and admiring comedian peers
lost patience with (the video I'm from Hollywood, which
chronicles Kaufman's women-wrestling and flamboyantly hostile
feud with Memphis wrestling king Jerry Lawler, is essential viewing).
Some of the movie depends on what you bring to it. When Kaufman
goes on the first show of Saturday Night Live with his
Mighty Mouse act, he stands around for a while onstage in nervous
silence, with live cameras rolling, while a frantic techie whispers
in Lorne Michaels' ear, "This is dead air."
Michaels (one of several real-life Kaufman acquaintances failing
to look years younger playing themselves here) just nods and
says nothing. It helps to know that the first SNL show
was in grave danger of going over 90 minutes, and that there
was tremendous pressure on Michaels to cut Kaufman's bit. Michaels
fought tooth and nail to keep Andy in the show. The scene in
the movie is a subtle foreshortening of all this: no cliched
reply from Michaels along the lines of "Just watch this
guy, trust me," just a nod as if to say "I know. It's
dead air. That's the act." This scene also stands in for
all the other Kaufman bits on SNL, where the Not Ready
for Prime Time Players warily respected him as a talented outsider
but found him a bit weird and unapproachable (one vehement exception
was John Belushi, who not only loved his act but hung out with
him whenever he did the show, watching wrestling in his dressing
room).
Man on the Moon represents the final film in an oddball
trilogy by screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski,
who seem to have devoted themselves to chronicling the lives
of holy fools of entertainment -- they also wrote Ed
Wood (directed by Tim Burton) and The
People Vs. Larry Flynt (directed by Milos Forman, who
also does the honors here). I'm not as big a fan of those other
two films as some people are. They each have rich and unusual
moments you won't see in any other movie, and they boast terrific
performances by eclectic casts, but I didn't feel the movies
squared with what we know about Ed Wood or Larry Flynt. In both
cases, the writers indulged in well-meaning revisionism, sanding
down the rough edges of these men and elevating their dubious
achievements so that Wood and Flynt seemed like misunderstood
geniuses -- of film, of First Amendment rights. Actually, I think
those men were understood perfectly well as the opportunists
and hustlers (no pun intended) they were, so I didn't buy the
writers' soft-focus canonization.
However, Andy Kaufman's entire act was based on being
misunderstood, so the writers do a much better job with him,
and they don't pretend his performances somehow contributed to
the greater good. Kaufman could be an exasperating prick, and
the movie acknowledges that: However much you enjoy watching
Andy's pranks and antics, you wouldn't want to be on the set
of Taxi on an eleven-hour workday and have to deal with
Tony Clifton. Alexander and Karaszewski also don't pretend to
"know" Kaufman, any more than Bob Zmuda or Andy's girlfriend
Lynne Margulies (Courtney Love, giving her second funky and engaging
performance for Milos Forman despite having less to do this time).
There's none of the sanctimony here that often marred Forman's
People Vs. Larry Flynt, in which you were either for Larry
or for the asshole prudes who tried to bring him down -- the
movie offered no middle ground. The First Amendment isn't at
stake here, just a career flaming out. And Forman and the writers
present Kaufman's career failure as his perverse victory.
Kaufman's hijinks, of course, drive his manager George Shapiro
(Danny DeVito) to distraction. How can you manage the career
of someone who keeps blowing it up? DeVito gives a quietly frustrated
performance as this commonsense vulgarian, the voice of reason
who says, "Are you doing this to entertain the audience,
or yourself?" Kaufman's response is to leave the room --
he knows Shapiro has a point. The casting of DeVito in this role
adds another layer of irony, since the real breakout star of
Taxi wasn't Kaufman (whose post-Taxi career floundered)
but Danny DeVito, who went on to become a respected director
and actor (too few people saw him in Living
Out Loud, a heartfelt change of pace for him, and a beautifully
calibrated performance). Together on Taxi, Kaufman and
DeVito were polar opposites: Kaufman's Latka was a naive, huggable
blowfish, DeVito's Louie a snapping turtle with a sharp beak.
Offscreen, DeVito was about the only cast member who got along
with Andy (Jeff Conaway, for one, hated his guts, and you can
see the sour-faced, silent Conaway in the movie, a has-been hating
Kaufman beyond the grave), and there's a touching subtext in
DeVito's reunion with Kaufman Version 2.0.
By now, so much has been written about Jim Carrey's subjugation
to the essence of Andy that to heap further praise on him could
risk redundancy. There's a central tension between Kaufman and
Carrey, though: Kaufman was passive-aggressive -- Carrey is just
plain aggressive. Kaufman was better than Carrey at faking flop
sweat: Carrey is as fearless as Kaufman was, yet when Carrey
mimics Kaufman shuffling his feet nervously, waiting for his
cue to lip-sync Mighty Mouse, you don't get the feeling that
Carrey's Kaufman might actually be nervous. (Kaufman loved
to bomb onstage, but he knew how to simulate stage fright convincingly.)
And it's hard at first to get past the physical differences:
Kaufman was schlumpy and soft, Carrey is handsome and sharp-featured
-- Edward Norton, who was also in the running for the role, would
have resembled Andy more closely. But Carrey nails Kaufman's
manic entertainer's drive -- his sense of fun, his view of the
world as his playpen. Carrey is also affecting in his dramatic
moments. Near the end of the movie, when the dying Andy jets
to the Phillippines for a miracle cure for his cancer and discovers
that the "psychic surgeon" is a quack -- a faker, just
like him -- Carrey's gallows laughter alone is worth an Oscar.
Man on the Moon is a teeming, fast-paced spin through
a particularly strange show-biz life. It does justice to Kaufman's
mystique and genius without pinning him down with psychobabble.
The very end, which recreates Tony Clifton's comeback concert
appearance a year after Kaufman's death, seems a bit too literal-minded
-- a bone thrown to the many people who believe Kaufman faked
his death. Yet emotionally it feels right. Even those closest
to Andy thought he was kidding when he told them about his fatal
lung cancer (he didn't even smoke), and to this day his friends
aren't absolutely sure he isn't out there somewhere. (Recently,
the National Enquirer ran a photo of Kaufman's death certificate
as irrefutable proof that he really is dead. The "Andy lives"
theorists will simply point out that Kaufman often submitted
bogus stories about himself to the Enquirer.)
The Andy-faked-his-death theory
actually makes more sense than the comparable theories about
Elvis, James Dean, or Jim Morrison, because Kaufman had talked
about doing it, and it's natural to believe that this was his
ultimate joke on everyone. I think the joke goes deeper than
that. What if Kaufman knew, years before he actually revealed
it, that he had cancer that would eventually kill him? What if
he then set out on a highly visible career, packing decades of
bizarre experience into one decade of stardom, and gaining a
rep for pranks and hoaxes? Then, when he died, everyone would
think he faked it, and the speculation would endure for years.
His actual death, not his faked death, was his ultimate
self-perpetuating joke on us all. Man on the Moon simply
keeps the joke going.
Note: The movie, of course, performed well
below expectations at the American box office, becoming Jim Carrey's
first bona fide flop. Disappointed as I was by this at first,
I have come to see it as the only true and poetic outcome of
a film about Andy Kaufman: He loved to bomb on stage and would
have enjoyed the irony of a Kaufman biopic bombing just as badly.
If nothing else, the movie's failure chalks up one more posthumous
triumph for Andy: Fifteen years after his death, people still
weren't ready for him.
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