When he was Tony Clifton, he had cheese - Limburger cheese - in his pockets so he smelled horrible. And he'd constantly be hugging people, and he had it all over his hands and stuff.
He was touching people and making them shake his hands all the time. The documentary is over the end-credits song (a warped version of R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon,” obviously) is already playing faintly in the background.Īnd that's the least of it.“Wow, we got into some crazy shit there, man.” This bewildered voice comes from off-camera at the conclusion of Jim & Andy, the new Netflix documentary about the making of the 1999 Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon, which starred Jim Carrey at the dizzying height of his fame. The thing Carrey has just said, on-camera, to prompt the crazy-shit response off-camera is, “I wonder what would happen if I decided to just be Jesus.” And there sits modern-day Jim Carrey, with his grayed suave-werewolf beard and piercing stare, perfectly lucid and alluringly calm and frightfully intense.
DADA KONDKE COSTUME FULL
The full title of this documentary, which is directed by Chris Smith and premiered Friday, is Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond-Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton, which gives you some idea of the meta gymnastics on display here. Basically, a camera crew followed Carrey around as he made Man on the Moon, adhering to the infamous Method-acting school by refusing to break character when portraying both Kaufman and Kaufman’s own famously boorish and loathsome alter ego, Tony Clifton. Carrey’s costars, from Danny DeVito to Paul Giamatti to a valiantly unfazed Courtney Love, suffered or at least politely winced accordingly. Meanwhile, present-day Jim Carrey provides talking-head commentary that sometimes directly responds to this old footage, until it stops even trying to do that: (DeVito, through teeth gritted spiritually if not literally: “This is so bizarre. The door is the realization that this, us, is seaside. There’s the avatar you create, the cadence you come up with that is pleasing to people and takes them away from their issues and makes you popular. And at some point you have to peel it away. This is a lot to deal with, mostly on purpose. Andy Kaufman was an easy-to-appreciate, harder-to-love comedy genius whose primary weapons were cognitive dissonance and profound discomfort-the audience’s discomfort, but also, usually, his fellow actors’ discomfort. When Kaufman was on camera, his was the least-important face on camera: The magic happened as you read the faces of everyone else as they vacillated between delight and confusion and what sure seemed to be genuine rage, the border between those emotions electrifyingly fluid.
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