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Let's hear it for method acting.
When Czech director Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus) set out to chronicle another divergent sojourner, comic performance artist Andy Kaufman, he first turned to writers Scott M. Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who scripted both his own The People Vs. Larry Flynt (for which they won Golden Globe and Writers Guild of America awards) and Tim Burton's brilliant Ed Wood. If you think about it, Kaufman was kind of a cross between the two -- some people recognized his vision (or whatever), lots of folks hated him, but he definitely broke new ground and expanded the boundaries of his chosen avenue of expression, a quest not fully appreciated until after his death -- so they were a logical choice for Man on the Moon.
But only us geeks ever go see a movie based on who wrote it, and Forman's critical success hadn't been reflected at the boxoffice lately, so his choice of actor was going to be a big deal. In a departure from usual procedure, auditions were taken by videotape, which narrowed the field down to handful including Edward Norton, John Cusack, and Jim Carrey. Forman let the studio, Universal Pictures, decide, and considering that trio's drawing power, it didn't take a telephone psychic to figure out who'd get the part.
Well, surprise. For one of the few times in film history, a casting decision made strictly for dollar reasons works out. Jim Carrey is great as the otherworldly Kaufman, apparently aided by his practice, according to Forman, of staying in character throughout shooting. A little weird maybe, but it worked. Carrey appears to be not so much portraying Andy as channeling him.
The film, though, like the life, is chiefly a montage of episodes, including eerily familiar recreations of events many of us will remember seeing firsthand, from which we have to try and decipher the real person behind those (literally and figuratively) unblinking eyes: the "Saturday Night Live" appearances that launched his national career, his role as the childlike Latka (based on his Foreign Man persona) on "Taxi", the wrestling misadventures (Memphis wrestler Jerry Lawler is very entertaining in restaging these scenes, including the infamous brawl on "Letterman"), the often baffling intrusions by his boorish lounge-singer alter ego Tony Clifton. So don't expect any revelations about where it all came from. But I just read a new book on Kaufman, Lost in the Funhouse by Sinatra biographer Bill Zehme, who's equally at a loss for explanation.
The proper approach to enjoying Man on the Moon, which features Danny DeVito as Andy's manager and "discoverer" George Shapiro, Paul Giamatti (Private Parts) as friend and co-conspirator Bob Zmuda, and Courtney Love as occasional love interest Lynn Margulies, is to just sit back and revel at an unlikely American original. From the playful opening to the touching yet equally playful ending, Man on the Moon is a celebration of nonconformity, of a skewed force of nature whose likes we won't likely see soon. A-
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