I just finished watching Man on the Moon, starring Jim Carrey in a film that purports to be a biography of the late Andy Kaufman. I came to the film with a slight handicap: I never really watched Taxi, nor did I otherwise ever really pay attention to Kaufman when he was alive, so I did not approach the film with too much emotional baggage.
Then again, maybe that was an advantage.
I had read that Kaufman was always pushing the edge of the envelope in terms of directing (and misdirecting) the heads of the audience members. One piece I read said Dustin Hoffman was in the audience once when Kaufman was trying to suck, and was impressed with Kaufman's control of the situation. The film makes it abundantly clear that Kaufman felt a need to always outdo his last mind game, until he achieved not simply a blurring of the line between reality and make-believe, but its total annihilation. At the end, when Kaufman tells his closest associates about his cancer, it is not at all surprising that nobody really believes him.
But then again, I'm basing this analysis on what was presented to me in a film, and when it comes to film, the phrase "based on" - which usually is glossed over and appears in small letters somewhere in a corner - plays the leading role of "weasel phrase" and opens the door to all sorts of new and improved mind games.
After all, Searching for Private Ryan - which has been used in classrooms to teach World War II history - was "based on" a true incident (i.e., 95% of the story never happened), as are most of Ollie Stone's films (JFK comes to mind, here) where the "fudge" factor may be highter. More recently, folks in the U.K. are miffed that the heroes of U-571 are a bunch of American boys, instead of the Britishers who actually participated in the seizure of the German Engima machine. And reliable word has it that the Brits are also ticked off about the torture treatment administered to the facts in Mel Gibson's Patriot and the soon-to-be-released Escape from Colditz, again largely because the story line "borrows" from history without really bothering to keep the facts in any semblance of straight.
Hollywood's defense, generally, is that the straight, undiluted facts generally don't make for good drama, but that's another discussion. The bottom line is that it's essential to remember, when watching a "based-on-a-true-story" movie, that what one is watching is not simply not the straight, unvarnished truth, but something that likely contains one part truth to oh-so-many-parts fabrication. It is - as is all art, to one degree or another - a mind game being played on the audience.
So what am I supposed to think about Man on the Moon? How true-to-life is it? But then again, does it matter? Should I care? The "man" in that story struck me as bizarre and tormented. The "nice guy" sequence in the last few minutes gave the film a smooth finish, but failed to reconcile the profound problems throughout what may be called Kaufman's "wrestling" phase, where his major successes consisted of getting large numbers of people to hate him. Deliberately, it would seem.
As I see it, those problems had to do with Kaufman's motivation. One of the most telling lines in the film is said by Shapiro (Danny DeVito), speaking to Kaufman and asking him (and here I paraphrase): "Are you doing this to entertain yourself, or the audience?"
I remember being asked this question, asked another way, back when I did close-up magic at the Forks Hotel in Buffalo. Bill Okal did the asking, and the answer, in my opinion, distinguishes the performers from the amateurs. The answer meshes well with the observation the old guy at the beginning of the film makes to Kaufman (whom he'd just fired): "show business" consists of a "show" part, and a "business" part, and that without the "business," there's no "show."
That basically means that unless a performer entertains the audience, there's really no need to report for work. But audiences are entertained by the familiar, it's what draws them back to see a performer over and over again. ("Hey, Tony, sing 'I Left My Heart in San Francisco', willya?") But that old, familiar stuff is what drives some performers crazy; it's not fresh, they're no longer interested in it, they wish they'd never have to perform it again, they wish the audience would grow up and move on, etc.
This was reflected in the film's sequence at the university. There, the audience only wanted "Latka" - Kaufman's trademark character on Taxi. They were ready to shower Kaufman with adulation and applause if he'd only do "Latka." Instead, Kaufman was intent on (apparently) doing a cover-to-cover recitation of The Great Gatsby. The pattern that Hoffman observed repeats.
Where Kaufman was concerned, however, his unique entertainment style was such that he could, for a while, allow himself the luxury of entertaining himself while he attempted to entertained everyone else. As the film depicts him, Kaufman was more interested in the former than the latter. And since he seemed to always single-mindedly pursue new, fresh escapades rather than repeat himself (except, possibly, with his fake male-chauvinist intergender wrestling challenge, which the film implies occurred several times), the result was a steady escalation of the level of outrage in his performances. Eventually, this led to his demise as a show-business personality.
As I watched the film, however, I was reminded of my own Kaufman-like episode as a member of a phone-in BBS back when I lived in Jacksonville, Florida. Among the system's features was collaborative story-building section, the gist of which was that people contributed sections to an ongoing story, with the most popular section (as voted upon by participants) fixed as the next "official" part of the tale. I stumbled upon this setup just after the first section of a new story had been voted upon and accepted, and decided to try to shift the focus by making the next section treat the first section as something that had been written by an author who is the real hero of the story, and to continue with a story line involving the author.
I was really bummed when nobody got the point of my post, even after I explained what I was trying to do. "We already agreed on the beginning," chirped some of the participants, "don't you understand that you can't change the story?" I found that I could stand the rejection - if people didn't like my stuff, that was okay - but I did not deal well with the lack of understanding. Kaufman, it would seem, could deal with both.
Technically, the movie went well, and I was impressed - I think - by how Jim Carrey could easily make me suspend my disbelief with regard to his presence on screen. I've found that in most Carrey films, I'm painfully aware that it's him on the screen, instead of whomever he is playing (for some reason, William Shatner falls into the same category in my mind). At any rate, in both Man on the Moon and Truman, it seems that Carrey is becoming [more of] an actor.
All in all, the film was worth the rental, I'd classify it as a see-once. There is little here that would draw me back.
Cheers...
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