Jim & Andy: the Great Beyond review: Jim Carrey goes full method in a comedic hall of mirrors
Dir: Chris Smith; Starring: Jim Carrey. No cert, 94 mins
When actors prepare for immersive roles, they often talk of "getting into character", as if the part is a kind of talcum-powdered body suit that zips snugly up the back. So there’s something enjoyably unsettling about hearing the process described as the exact reverse of that – a kind of snake-like shedding of the self.
That’s the essence of Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond, a new Netflix documentary in which Jim Carrey discusses playing the cult American comedian Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon, Miloš Forman’s offbeat 1999 biopic. Kaufman’s perplexing television appearances had been an inspiration to the teenage Carrey in 1970s Ontario, so adding him to his stable of eccentric characters clearly struck the star as a privilege.
Except by then, ‘Jim Carrey’ was something of an established character himself, thanks to the extraordinary quick-fire success of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask and Dumb and Dumber in 1994. As he describes it today, from behind a furtive lighthouse-keeper beard that itself looks like a form of disguise, Carrey seized the chance to abandon his own life for a while, and fully inhabit the Kaufman persona – plus occasionally Kaufman’s own alter ego, his cantankerous lounge singer character Tony Clifton – whether Forman’s cameras were rolling or not. The cast and crew had to address him as either Andy or Tony, who would relay their messages to ‘Jim’, wherever he was.
At the time, Carrey commissioned Kaufman’s girlfriend Lynn Margulies and his writing partner Bob Zmuda to capture his method antics on camera, and this backstage material, which sat in Carrey’s office untouched for 20 years, forms the spine of Chris Smith’s film.
In line with Kaufman’s own fondness for blurring truth and imposture, Carrey suggests the ideal version of Man on the Moon would have intercut Forman’s carefully constructed period piece with the haphazard making-of footage – which itself became a kind of gonzo performance art project.
Carrey claims the tapes were embargoed by Universal at the time “so that people wouldn’t think I was an a__hole,” which does ring true as you watch him torment his co-stars in character – not least the professional wrestler Jerry “The King” Lawler, with whom the real Kaufman had engaged in an absurd public feud.
Kaufman died of lung cancer in 1984, and the film’s most quietly extraordinary sequences show Carrey meeting his surviving family members in character, as if channeling his spirit. The emotions he stirs up are very clearly genuine, but there is a mad presumptuousness about the act itself that deserved to be more rigorously explored.
Carrey, now 55, is an engaging and candid subject, but his reminiscences all feel hand-picked and carefully rehearsed, which makes the present-day sections of the film feel less like an interview than a TED Talk. That said, he draws some compelling parallels between being Jim Carrey circa 1999 and his character in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, an unwitting reality television star who finally gives his synthetic life the slip.
Being Kaufman, he explains, allowed him to step outside the dome, and test the special allowances society makes for comedians to their eye-popping, nerve-shredding limit. Jim and Andy itself does nothing of the sort: it’s here to burnish one performer’s legend while laying the foundations of another’s. But there’s still lots of fun to be had in its twisting, telescoping hall of mirrors.
Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond is on Netflix on 17 November 17
