Max "Bunny" Sparber

SIXTEEN YEARS after Andy Kaufman’s death, one of his noxious alter egos was still making trouble. At a press junket for the film Man on the Moon, a man disguised as Tony Clifton — an abusive Vegas lounge singer Kaufman played throughout his career — picked a fight with Jim Carrey; the Clifton impersonator sprayed graffiti on a door and waved a prosthetic penis at horrified members of the press until security guards dragged him away.

This is Kaufman’s legacy: the comedian delighted in a sadistic sort of confrontational theater that alienated audiences more often than it delighted them, and the fact that Kaufman’s most hostile creation should survive him for so long and still dish out abuse is fitting. True to Kaufman’s lifelong insistence that Clifton was a real person, the credits at the end of Man on the Moon list Tony Clifton as playing himself, alongside such notable cameos as Lorne Michaels and David Letterman.

If star Jim Carrey deserved an Academy Award in 1999, it was for his seething performance as Clifton in this film. He didin't win it for playing Kaufman, although he certainly behaved as though he deserved to, engaging in a campaign of self-promotion that has become ridiculous, with Carrey claiming that he somehow channeled Kaufman’s dead soul for inspiration. “Andy just showed up,” Carrey told USA Today. “And if people wanted to talk to the person acting in the film, they figured out they had to call him Andy, because I wasn’t answering to Jim.”

Method acting pomposity aside, Carrey’s performance as Kaufman is mesmerizing; always an actor with a supreme gift for vocal and physical mimicry, Carrey does an astonishing job of re-creating Kaufman the performer in Moon’s many scenes set at television studios and comedy stages. These sequences act as, essentially, abridged versions of Kaufman’s greatest hits — a kind of cinematic retrospective, similar to the Little David Years CD anthology George Carlin put out earlier in 1999. Often Moon’s reconstructed performances work better than Kaufman’s actual act, as the performer steadfastly refused to let audiences in on his pranks, leaving them bewildered and infuriated. In Man on the Moon, we’re all co-conspirators in Kaufman’s pranking, looking on gleefully as he baffles audiences with readings from The Great Gatsby and wildly sexist intergender wrestling matches. Despite Kaufman’s occasional protestations that he was simply an entertainer (in a moment of pure absurdity he once described himself as a “song and dance man”), Kaufman was something else altogether. His performances still leave critics floundering for comparisons, from Anne Beatts’ comment that “he twitches!” to Robert Smigel’s insistence that Kaufman was “the modern art version of comedy.” Marty Feldman, who directed Kaufman in the film In God We Tru$t, might have come closest to the truth when he described Kaufman’s performances as having “a sense of danger, a kind of general anger.”

Kaufman’s comedy seemed fueled by a smoldering rage; it expressed itself in his performances as ongoing cruelty, although his biography is empty of the sort of temper tantrums so common to angry performers (a longtime practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, Kaufman often affected a peculiarly blissed-out attitude), but if there is one theme common to all of Kaufman’s work it is rage. He was particularly adept in inspiring it in others; it leered on the faces of infuriated audiences at his wrestling matches (audiences he taunted mercilessly), it appeared in his interactions with other performers (Taxi co-stars Judd Hirsch, Tony Danza and Jeff Conaway couldn’t stand him; a furious Conaway struck Kaufman in the face at the 1979 Golden Globes Awards ceremony), and it found its purest form in the abusive Clifton.

Man on the Moon refuses to address, or even acknowledge, this rage. Carrey’s offstage Kaufman appears to be, at worst, mildly autistic; onstage he’s a lovable prankster who rarely received the accolades his genius deserved. We shouldn’t be surprised that director Milos Forman and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski would approach the Kaufman story from this angle — they trod similar ground in Ed Wood and The People vs. Larry Flint. Alexander and Karaszewski are good storytellers, but they are terrible biographers, in every instance altering or manufacturing details in their subjects’ lives to support the story they want to tell. This is the third time they’ve taken a marginal or cult figure from American popular culture and turned him into a heroic, misunderstood rebel, and their simplistic narrative grows thin and frays at the edges in Moon. Kaufman simply was too great an enigma to be trapped in a simple story (Jay Leno summed up the Kaufman experience by saying that he was “basically confusing to spend any time around”).

Just as the screenwriters smoothed the rough edges of Ed Wood’s life by ignoring his final, pathetic years of alcoholism, so they try to clean up the Andy Kaufman story. Alexander and Karaszewski hint at Kaufman’s predatory sexual habits, but fail to examine them; despite setting a long scene at a college campus, the film never mentions the fact that Kaufman used tours of the college comedy circuit to troll for coeds. His youthful obsession with Elvis Presley likewise goes unexplored, as does his career failures (the film Heartbeeps and several unpublished novels, for example). Moon juggles the narrative so that one of Kaufman’s greatest triumphs, his Carnegie Hall concert, comes at the end of his life as a response to the news that he has developed fatal cancer. In reality, the concert occurred in 1979, five years before Kaufman’s death.

The trouble here is that Kaufman’s life, like his career, was nothing but rough edges; smoothed away, a tremendous mystery lies at the center, and even with Carrey channeling Kaufman, Moon does nothing to unravel the mystery. We are not even given the origins of many of his famous routines, even though they are widely known (Tony Clifton, for example, was loosely based on comedian Richard Belzer), so even Kaufman’s performances retain an distinctly otherworldly feel, as though it isn’t comedy we are watching but instead a transmission from Venus.

While Ed Wood and Larry Flynt were also guilty of botching their subjects’ biographies, they made for good movies because they centered around several tremendously compelling characters; Moon cannot offer anything comparable. With Kaufman remaining a cipher, his relationships never become developed. Danny DeVito, Courtney Love and Paul Giammati (as Kaufman’s producer, girlfriend and writing partner, respectively) are all excellent in the film, but the script gives them so little with which to work that they hardly register as performers. A pity, because the characters they play are fascinating in their own right. For example, Lynn Margulies (played by Love) directed the documentary I’m from Hollywood, which contains a fuller examination of Kaufman’s obsession with professional wrestling than Moon could have dared to attempt. In Moon, however, there is little for Love to do but cheerlead Kaufman’s theater of brutality and shed bitter tears when he dies.

And Kaufman dies in Moon; the filmmakers take great pains to make his death as poignant as possible. Interestingly, a sizable contingent of Kaufman’s fans don’t believe the comic died at all, but that he faked his own burial as a final, terrible prank. Many speculated that Kaufman would appear at the premiere of his own cinematic biography just as Clifton appeared at the press junket, lurking in the audience like Tom Sawyer at his own funeral and laughing at his marvelous stunt. If Kaufman did appear, he did so unnoticed. Perhaps he had planned take the stage at the Academy Awards to steal the Oscar out of Jim Carrey’s hands and dash it to the ground, but the Oscars bested him by not awarding Carrey at all.

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