* *
Running time: 118 mins
Rental: Today
Review: Ewan McDonald
Tricky one this, because New Zealanders didn't really get to know the subject of the movie, 80s' comedian Andy Kaufman. He lit up our lounges briefly in Taxi, one of the sharpest sitcoms ever screened, but a generation of Americans were dazzled, then bewildered by his off-the-wall standup act and his Saturday Night Live appearances.
The film opens with Kaufman as a kid who refuses to go out and play, preferring to stay in his room, hosting his own TV variety programme for the cameras he believes are hidden in his bedroom walls. He graduates to the LA standup circuit and is spotted by a talent scout (Danny DeVito).
Kaufman is soon a regular on Taxi (watch for cabmates Marilu Henner, Christopher Lloyd and Judd Hirsch as themselves, but not DeVito).
As Taxi goes off the air Kaufman has never been more famous but his life is going downhill. He has a bizarre nightclub act, at one stage wrestling women and brawling with a wrestler on the Letterman show; he is in a twisted relationship; he is dying of cancer.
Jim Carrey, Hollywood's most bankable star playing America's most unemployable star of his time, disappears into the character of Kaufman but he is an actor at the peak of his powers in a movie that rarely works. Courtney Love, as his partner, shows that if she ever gives up the night job she can star in her alternative career.
Ultimately, as Kaufman seems to have been, impossible to figure out.
<i>Video:</i> Man On The Moon
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