Word: kaufmans
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...Carrey's uncanny portrayal of Kaufman may be the film's main draw, but it is Alexander and Karaszewski's re-creation of Kaufman's life, enigmatic and unapologetic, that best captures his anarchic spirit. "Sure, Jim's performance channeled the guy, but it's all part of a whole," explains Danny DeVito, who not only produced and co-stars in Man on the Moon but also appeared with Kaufman on Taxi. "Without a good script, everybody knows you'll wind up empty-handed. They nailed him, baby...
...screenwriters concede that they massaged some facts for dramatic effect. To offset the downbeat reality of Andy's premature death, for example, they took a successful Carnegie Hall show from early in Kaufman's career and recast it as his last hurrah before succumbing to cancer. Several girlfriends were combined into a composite character, played by Courtney Love, and a few other liberties were taken as well. But Kaufman's life remains familiar to those who best know it. "Facts, schmacts, they made him honest," says Bill Zehme, who spent six years researching Kaufman for his comprehensive new book Lost...
...short, weird career of Andy Kaufman poses a single, overriding issue: Was he a self-conscious genius of the put-on, cleverly calculating his effects, which were ever poised on the thin line that separates childish innocence from transgression? Or was he just another of those sociopaths, unable to tell right from wrong, funny from unfunny, whom the popular culture occasionally dredges up to amuse and confuse...
Milos Forman's film Man on the Moon, and Jim Carrey's performance as the artist constantly in question, don't attempt to answer that conundrum. Both merely present Kaufman with a dispassionate, ultimately hypnotizing objectivity. It is very possibly the best work each man has done, and assuredly the best thing screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski have done in a joint career devoted to odd fellows--Ed Wood, Larry Flynt--coolly observed...
...film somewhat scants Kaufman's only widely popular success, as Latka, the "foreign man" of Taxi. But all his other creations are here in full: the Mighty Mouse lip syncher, the Elvis impersonator, the wrestler who challenged women in the audience. And, of course, Tony Clifton, the hostile Las Vegas lounge singer. Carrey is easy in all those guises but never frantic for our favor. He gives a wonderfully disciplined performance...