Opens December 22, 1999

It's easy to see why comedian Andy Kaufman was pilloried by the public. In short, the man was a bastard. A brilliant bastard, but a bastard nonetheless. In his newest film Man on the Moon, Milos Forman, who seems to be making a career now of disseminating American pop icons, tries to show that Andy was less a bastard and more a misunderstood soul. He hardly succeeds.

The film begins with incredible promise, thanks to a risky, black and white opening "movie" in which Andy breaks the fourth wall and welcomes the audience, apologizing for how bad his movie is going to be. After this, the credits roll, and then the real movie starts. It's the biggest laugh of the picture, which lacks the same zany inventiveness as this inspired moment.

What the movie does show us is that Kaufman was a creative whirlwind, a man who constantly wanted to push the boundaries of comedy, good taste and public scrutiny. Andy's fellow comedians and those who worked with him still say he was a creative genius, although watching people's reactions to Andy in the film, you can't imagine these folks admiring him. As Latka on Taxi, he is an egomaniacal first-time actor, who insists in his contract that his "friend" Tony Clifton appear in four of the episodes. Tony Clifton, as most people know, was an utterly obnoxious, blue-tuxedo clad lounge lizard created by Andy incognito.

By the way, a moment for a short aside/pet peeve of mine. Danny DeVito, who was one of the stars of Taxi appears in the film as George Shapiro, Kaufman's agent. I don't know about you, but watching DeVito playing another character, while he was conspicuously absent from the Taxi sequences, just seemed weird to me. Yes, I know, I'm splitting hairs, but I just call 'em like I see 'em. If something takes the audience out of the action in a film, it's a mistake.

So, back to our hero. Andy uses Taxi for one thing alone -- to make his name. According to the movie, he hated being on the show and thought the writing was horrible. Surprising news, considering it was a critically lauded sitcom. But then, that's Andy. He had his own, very specific ideas of humor. Signing on to Taxi, Andy also gets another of his demands met. He wants his own TV special, which features his typically adolescent humor and alienates the network executives. In one bit, he insists that the vertical hold on the TV set be messed with. As he gleefully tells the execs, "It'll be great. People will think their TV's are broken." Okay, Andy, whatever. It's not hard to see why this guy punched people's buttons, is it?

On Saturday Night Live, Andy garners a fan base, but again plays the alienation game with his outside stunts, the most famous of which include inter-gender wrestling and a feud with pro wrestler Jerry Lawler, who assaults Andy on "The David Letterman Show." One of the few surprises to me was that Lawler was in on this stunt with Andy from the start. Well, all this is well and good in a sort of sensationalized "National Enquirer" get-a-glimpse-into-the-life way. But, where is the real Andy Kaufman in all this inspired weirdness? Unfortunately, the message that comes across is that there was no "real" Andy, that he only came alive when he was messing with people. That fact seems incredibly sad, yet I never really felt this pathos. Everything here was intellectual.

The core of this film is "who was the real Andy Kaufman" and, if it had been explored with true insight, it could have been profoundly interesting. Instead of trying to pick apart the Kaufman psychology, writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski almost romanticize him. Okay, he was a bastard, but it's a "romantic" bastardization. And, while Carrey's portrayal of Kaufman is nothing short of remarkable, capturing the comic's quirks perfectly, it still lacks a center of humanity, which isn't really Carrey's fault. Indeed, one of the film's most affecting and humane moments, when a cancer-ridden Andy goes to a healer in the Philippines only to find that the man is a charlatan like Andy himself, doesn't ring true.

Given these writers' credits (Ed Wood and The People vs. Larry Flynt), I expected more from them. Yes, the writing is smart, but it's sloppy. For instance, Kaufman's lifelong friend Bob Zmuda (Paul Giamatti) literally appears out of thin air one day with no inking of who he is or how important he is in Kaufman's life. In many ways, Kaufman and Zmuda were two sides of the same coin, yet Zmuda's influence is downplayed as the writers rhapsodize about Andy's creativity. None of these elements are helped by Milos Forman's bland direction. Somehow, he takes a man who was larger than life and makes him seem flat.

Perhaps, the real trouble though is that Andy Kaufman is impossible to define, impossible to pin down. He didn't "know" himself, so why should others know him? As he tells his girlfriend Lynne (Courtney Love), "there is no real me." Aside from a few genuine moments, the only real Andy we see is the jerk who liked to screw with people's heads. Perhaps that has its own attraction, but to spend two hours with a guy who does what he does just because "it's funny" somehow fails to make you laugh.