Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond
(2017)
Or, to give it its full subtitle, Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond – The Story of Jim Carrey & Andy
Kaufman Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony
Clifton. Carrey’s in a contradictory place just now, on the one hand
espousing his commitment to a spiritual path and enlightened/ing state, on the
other being sued in respect of his ex-girlfriend’s suicide and accompanying allegations regarding his behaviour. That behaviour – in a professional context
– and his place of consciousness are the focus of Jim & Andy, and an oft-repeated mantra (great for motivational
speeches) that “I learned that you can
fail at what you don’t love, so you may as well do what you love. There’s
really no choice to be made”. The results are consequently necessarily
contradictory, but always fascinating.
You can find much of the same proselytising in a speech Jim
gave to the graduates of the Maharishi University of Management’s class of
2014, accompanied by just enough shtick to make the pill an easy swallow. Some
have claimed Carrey’s been dabbling in DMT (to the extent that a fake movie with
him playing Terence McKenna was announced), but it appears he’s merely a
proponent of the Maharishi’s good old money-making Transcendental Meditation, a
practice that mostly avoids a rocky ride thanks to some notable and vocal media
advocates (the most famous being David Lynch). Andy Kaufman was also an ardent
TM-er, having learned it at college in 1969, even training as a teacher a
couple of years later. It’s a connection so loud and obvious, you wonder that
the filmmakers didn’t at least mention it in passing…
Carrey’s clearly been on a very personal journey of questioning
the status quo for a while, both internally and externally, in ways that have
passed largely unnoticed (GM foods) or registered howls of media outrage
(vaccinations), en route gradually disappearing off the map as a viable movie
star. In Chris Smith’s documentary on the making of Man on the Moon, he comments “I
have no ambition” (although not asked directly about his stalled career), but
while his explanation for the transition is vague enough to be understood (It
came “in the middle of confusion,
disappointment, the fruition of all my dreams…. and being unhappy”), it’s
evident his ambition is still there, and the need to be adored, if not to make
money (look at it him talking about his painting during the MUM talk,
essentially seeking the same audience approval he always has, and lapping up
the rapturous responses). I don’t doubt his genuineness when he states (again
to MUM) “I’ve often said, I wish people
could receive all their dreams and wealth and fame so that they could see that
it’s not going to be where you find your sense of completion” but the
question is whether he’s an effective purveyor of that message; you’re in a
dangerous and vulnerable place when you announce that you have answers, often
setting yourself up to be torn down (as happened to Tom Cruise, who managed to
weather the storm, ultimately by shutting the hell up).
With Carrey on a voyage of discovery – I’m assuming he
doesn’t think he’s reached his destination – it’s valid to question the reasons
for this documentary appearing now. One
might assume, given the rehearsed script he trots out, that it was a
self-initiated platform, since he’s the guy with the footage, and that it
merely confirms – one might offer in evidence his recent New York Fashion Week
red carpet appearance – that he still feeds off and craves attention. Spike
Jonze and Smith attest otherwise, that he made no stipulations, but there’s an
inevitable sense that Carrey’s to-camera perspective moulds the doc, bringing
in such areas as the trajectory of fame and life under the lens (The Truman Show is flashed up several
times).
Carrey famously wrote himself a $10m cheque and gave himself
five years to collect, and his creed on this, set out in both Jim & Andy and the MUM talk, is that
when he was a kid – he cites how his father was a great comedian, eventually
laid low by the need to forsake pursuing a talent for breadwinning in the
sterile role of an accountant, and then even losing his that – he prayed for a
bicycle and one turned up at the house (someone had entered his name in a
raffle) and “From then, whenever I wanted
something, I manifested it”. His technique (not detailed in the doc) is “letting the universe know what you want and are
looking toward while letting go of how it comes to pass” (while throwing in
such alluring aphorisms as hope being a beggar that walks through the fire
while faith leaps over it).
And it’s this Noel Edmonds-like acumen for manifestation/ positive
thinking/ cosmic ordering that led, by his account, to discovering the key to personal
success, the realisation that the public want to be free from concern and “I’m gonna appear to be the guy that’s free
from concern”. And behold, a star was born: “It’s as if I went into a fugue state, Hyde showed up… I have a Hyde
inside me, that shows up when there are people watching”.
This ability was perfect for inhabiting the characters of Andy
Kaufman, where the line between performance and reality was constantly blurred.
Carrey has it that “Andy tapped me on the
shoulder and said “Sit down, I’ll be doing my movie” with the consequence “And no one knew what was real and not real
half the time. I didn’t know what was real and not real”. Individuals
including Taxi co-stars Danny DeVito and Judd Hirsch, Paul Giamatti and
beleaguered director Milos Forman, who called Carrey one night – the actor was
in character most of the time, but I’m guessing not on the phone – complaining
“I’m so exhausted you know” at having
to deal with Kaufman and alter ego, boorish nightclub singer Tony Clifton, all
day.
The latter’s antics included insulting Ron Meyer, showing up
at Amblin (Spielberg was absent), and Kaufman’s long-time collaborator Bob
Zmuda (Kaufman’s girlfriend Lynne Margulies was also present on the set of Man on the Moon, shooting the behind-the-scenes
footage seen here) visiting the Playboy Mansion as Clifton and spending several
hours there hoodwinking Heff before Carrey nonchalantly showed up.
Carrey’s both engaged and forthcoming as a talking head, but
also vaguely aloof from the experience. Some have suggested he’s “totally obnoxious”, which I can’t say
was my take (although he’d probably accept it if charged). He comments “On an anarchist level, it’s funny” of
Clifton, who I can’t really get behind any more than Borat, but unlike, say
Leto as the Joker, it seems to fit the bizarreness of Kaufman himself that Carrey
should have been so disruptive, that, the performance aspect feels like a
genuinely deserved comeuppance for the arrogance of thinking you could make a
trouble-free Kaufman biopic (which no one was going to see anyway, even if it
had received glowing reviews). You can accuse Carrey of going too far, but
giving him the role was essentially an invitation. Wrestler Jerry Lawler’s
protestations that he and Kaufman were good friends, which wasn’t how Carrey
treated him, are really neither here nor there in terms of a mission statement
to carry the anarchic baton (one of my favourite comments comes as “Tony” is
told, that, when filming is finished, eight or nine people will sue for mental
stress; “And that would be different than
a regular production?” inquires Clifton, blasé).
There are odd
moments, even in that take-no-prisoners context, though, such as Kaufman’s daughter,
who never got to meet him before he passed away, spending an hour in
conversation with Carrey as Andy on set, a recollection that brings a tear to
his eye. Kaufman’s family evidently felt
Carrey was channelling something too, so you might understandably see the whole
charade as a hugely inappropriate presumption on the comedian’s part, but from
the footage it’s entirely plausible that, as he suggests, he and everyone else was
caught up in something overwhelming and immersive. Carrey’s mantra was “How far would Andy take this?”, but he’s
also clear that his being in situ for this doc and revealing the tricks of the
trade is a sign that “I’m not the same
personality as Andy. Andy would never tell you”.
You can entirely see that Carrey’s on to something when he
says of the footage, “I often wish that
had been part of the movie”; it would have better reflected the essence of
what Kaufman was about, something Forman’s formal film could not hope to
capture. Carrey had seized on recording footage as a reaction against
electronic press kits, and reports how Universal didn’t want to allow any of it
to surface “so that people wouldn’t think
I was an asshole”: ‘We don’t want
people to think that Jim’s an asshole’”. The doc still feels like a dare in
that regard.
But, while the footage is fascinating, it’s Carrey’s current
head space as refracted through its prism that is more so. Tremendous
self-awareness doesn’t necessarily equate with being in an optimal place, and
one wonders at a certain stagnancy that allows the same lines to be parroted
describing his developed consciousness and mission three-to-four years apart.
Is he really in a place, or is he clinging to the idea of it? Carrey comments
that each of his roles has reflected an “absolute
manifestation of my consciousness at that time” (the funniest account might
be that of Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind, meeting with Michel Gondry at a point where he was
heartbroken; Gondry told him “Oh my God,
you’re so beautiful… right now. You’re so broken… I love this. Please don’t get
well”. “That’s how fucked up this
business is”, Carrey grins). Combine that with his belief that each of us
is an avatar we create (“This isn’t real”),
and his very TM statement “All we really
yearn for is our own absence”, and it’s difficult not to see the “drug
high” some recovering TM practisers have attested to before the come down. When
he says, in closing, of his Kaufman transformation, “I wonder if I could do that with other people… what would happen if I
decided just to be Jesus”, he’s only half being cheeky.
And there’s the problem too that, behind the wacky delivery,
the Maharishi message is somewhat jaded currency (“Thought as an illusory thing”, his understanding “I was the universe, no longer a fragment of
the universe” and that “I want to
take as many people as I possibly can” along with him to that rapturous state).
The key to a salesman for a system of self-awareness is whether you think you’d
like to be where they are, and neither Carrey nor Lynch offer that kind of
appeal (to me, at least). Jim mutters abstractly about “abstract structures” (the labels society and family attach to us),
avowing “I don’t need to be held
together, I’m fine just floating through space like Andy”. But is he? Since
his next lines are, however self-effacingly (this is a guy who made a movie
about the number 23, so part of him buys it), that he’s “ready for the end times to occur and whatever the hell is going to
happen. I’m just great”. You wonder if he is. Great. Are you just great,
Jim?
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.