MAN ON THE MOON

MAN ON THE MOON (1999) **

Reviewed 12/2/99

Milos Forman's new film, Man on the Moon, based on the life of Andy Kaufman, starts off promisingly, too promisingly. Kaufman (Jim Carey), talking to the audience, plays a Kaufman-esque joke on us telling us the movie is over when it has just begun (it also acts as a disclaimer for the film's dramatic liberties). This meta-narrative opening prepares us for a movie full of such playfulness, but that playfulness never arrives. Instead we get a standard-issue biopic, one in which Carey is so busy being Andy Kaufman that he forgets to be alive. Like The People Vs. Larry Flynt, Man on the Moon opens with a short scene with the protagonist as a child, then immediately plunges us into his adult life, following the ups and downs of his career.

Ironically, in Forman's Amadeus, which is not really about Mozart, the character of Mozart comes off as much more human than Kaufman does here in a film that is supposed to be about Kaufman. Of course Man on the Moon also sports the idea that there may not be a real Kaufman, only a parade of fictional personalities: Kaufman as a man whose very life is a performance art piece. This romanticizes him too much, and so when instances of a "real" Kaufman appear, they feel enormously banal. This is all the more so because these instances are usually when Kaufman is battling for his "art" against an prohibitive capitalism. Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski go so far as to reduce Kaufman's philosophy into a single trite statement he utters -- the world is an illusion and we shouldn't take it too seriously. It is trite, not because of any untruth, but because the film doesn't actualize this statement. It feels so self-important yet so out of the blue.

This brings up the other polar opposition in the film, us versus them. The us is those who "get" Kaufman's humor, the them is those who don't. The opening sequence, Kaufman tells us, is an attempt to weed out those who don't understand him. The rest of the film rewards us by making us feel superior to all the close-minded dullards who simply don't understand Kaufman's pomo genius. The film is also disingenuous about Kaufman's efficacy on professional wrestling. Its heels were Kaufman's caricatures long before and after him. The only difference is that Kaufman was a celebrity come-to-wrestling, which was not new either.

Danny DeVito as Kaufman's manager George Shapiro and Courtney Love as love-interest Lynne Margulies are bland and unremarkable. Most of the cast of Taxi return to play themselves. They might not look as bad as if the original cast of Star Trek tried to play themselves twenty years earlier, but they don't look a lot better than that either. Christopher Lloyd strangely seems to stay in the character of Jim even though the cameras aren't rolling. Danny DeVito as himself is conspicuously absent in the Taxi scenes (although it could have been a good joke had he appeared as Louie DePalma as a riff on Kaufman and his own alter ego Tony Clifton). Others playing themselves include David Letterman, Paul Shaffer, Lorne Michaels, and Jerry Lawler. Those who look for Vincent Schiavelli in Milos Forman's films will not be disappointed as he appears here as an ABC exec.

The visages of George Burns and Mel Brooks hang in the background, and the end invites us to place Kaufman in the canon with Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and Charles Chaplin. The film does not make a great case for this. Kaufman finds a superior tribute in R.E.M.'s 1992 title song that arrives for the end credits. It has a lyricism the film lacks. If only Forman had made a film that Kaufman himself would have been proud.