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As for "The Cable Guy," let's just say that if it had cost $40,000 and been made by NYU students, instead of costing Columbia Pictures $40 million (half of it Carrey's salary), critics would still be talking about it as one of the decade's surprise masterpieces. Carrey and director Ben Stiller transformed the goofball persona millions of viewers had grown to love into someone deviant and sinister -- Chip Douglas is another loser who thinks he knows what he's doing, but he wants to take over your life and invade every inch of your personal space. Besides, in its own twisted way, it's absolutely hilarious; Carrey's karaoke version of the Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" may be the sickest, weirdest, most Kaufmanesque thing he's ever done.

When journalist Ron Rosenbaum, one of the high priests of the Kaufman cult, saw Carrey impersonate Kaufman's Conga Guy character at a 1997 Hollywood party -- before Carrey had even gotten the "Man on the Moon" part -- he was struck by the uncanny connection between the two. "Whether or not haunted congas possessed him," Rosenbaum wrote in Esquire, "for one brief midnight moment of conga madness, Jim Carrey was Andy Kaufman, capturing something essential about Andy: the preoccupation with the dangerous, self-intoxicating madness of the performing self at its most ecstatic."

I'm worried that the likely success of "Man on the Moon" will make Carrey and his army of agents and managers draw precisely the wrong conclusions -- instead of understanding that Carrey's success depends on "the performing self at its most ecstatic," they'll decide that now he has to be an Actor. There's no question that Carrey can act; he controls his emotions almost as readily as his Gumby-like physique. But those who celebrated Carrey's "real" acting in "The Truman Show," it seems to me, are hewing to a totally inappropriate standard. Why is it morally superior to play one consistent character all the way through a film, rather than the dozens of fragmentary personas Carrey adopts and casts off in "Ace Ventura" or "The Mask"? He's a showman -- don't we want to see him put on his best show?

Mind you, if Carrey really wants to experiment with difficult dramatic roles, I say more power to him. He purportedly did a fine job as a young alcoholic in the 1992 TV movie "Doing Time on Maple Drive" (which isn't available on video). I bet he could play the anguished young men of modern drama brilliantly -- say, Biff in "Death of a Salesman," Brick in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" or Edmund in "Long Day's Journey Into Night." But there are other people who can do those roles, and anyway they lead actors down a slippery slope into a dreary Hanks/Williams future of understanding shrinks, conscientious cops, inner-city schoolteachers and heroic dying husbands.

So far Carrey has resisted this path. His next film is "Me, Myself and Irene," a Farrelly brothers comedy in which he plays a character with a split personality. In the holiday season of 2000, he'll star as the green antihero of Ron Howard's "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas," surely a role Carrey was born to play. There's been talk of remaking Don Knotts' "The Incredible Mr. Limpet," in which a man turns into a fish.

Animals, monsters and guys with unlikely psychiatric conditions -- this is absolutely the terrain where Jim Carrey is going to find his greatest freedom. He isn't Andy Kaufman and he never will be, but the gift he has is no less rare and wonderful, and it shouldn't be wasted in "quality" films. If Kaufman visits Carrey at night, I hope he tells him to let lesser mortals play hefty garbagemen who save drowning toddlers; Jim's mission is to root through the trash and celebrate what he finds there. Then Andy quits talking out his ass, stands up and slowly melts away into the night.
salon.com | Dec. 7, 1999

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