WIRED

Jim Carrey turns up the voltage in "The Cable Guy" By STEPHANIE ZACHAREK Illustration by Matt Robinson Part of the appeal of Jim Carrey -- and probably the main thing that draws even his detractors to his movies -- is the challenge of rising to his bait: How much of me do you think you can stand? he asks, smirking and mugging like every playground putz you ever told to vamoose. He has a way of turning almost every performance into an endurance test for his audience, a kind of perverse Iron Man competition, or at least a bout with one of those inflatable punching clowns you used to beat the living daylights out of as a kid. By the time you've reached the end of either of the Ace Ventura movies, or "Dumb and Dumber," or especially his latest, "The Cable Guy," it's not Carrey who's down for the count. There's no sand in his butt and no egg on his face. He doesn't care what you think of him, and in his own twisted, excessive way, he demands that you respect him for it. Enjoying Carrey--and sometimes even just tolerating him--demands a certain looseness, a willingness to play up to his audaciousness and to accept that his brilliance is often wayward. I can't imagine anyone not being impressed by his physical comedy: He's a daddy-long-legs made out of pipe cleaners and rubber bands one minute, a motorized stick figure with a snapping-jackknife kind of precision the next. And yet there are plenty of "enlightened" moviegoers who want nothing to do with him. When it came out, around Christmas 1994, "Dumb and Dumber" was decried as the end of Western civilization as we know it, almost always by people who hadn't even seen it; they seized on its title as a buzzword for the dumbing-down of this here America, just as they latched onto Dan Quayle's inability to spell potato, or doofy Bush-isms like "Read my lips," to show how hyperaware they were of the country's intellectual backsliding. Naturally, those are the same people who can't accept that low comedy can be either good or bad depending on how it's executed. (They wouldn't consider Chaucer's "Millers Tale" low comedy, of course, because it's literature with a capital L.) That's not to say that low laughs are the only ones we should look for. There's plenty to laugh at in a nicely made, perfectly entertaining movie like John Schlesinger's "Cold Comfort Farm." But it's a comedy that doesn't let itself go, and sitting through it with an educated-to-the-eyeteeth audience, having to endure two hours of titters and trills of genteel laughter sprinkled around like so much self-congratulatory pixie dust, is enough to make you want to go out and harpoon a few big, dumb laughs yourself. Carrey's just the guy to deliver them -- but not in "The Cable Guy," which certainly isn't going to sway anyone who still isn't sold on Carrey. As a lisping sad-sack of a cable installer who has no friends (the fact that he's an overbearing psycho probably has something to do with it), Carrey is edgier than he's ever been before, grabbing at molecules of free-floating hostility every chance he gets. It's hard to feel anything for him except repugnance as he wedges himself into -- and nearly ruins -- the life of good-guy schmoe Matthew Broderick. The character Carrey plays here (he calls himself "Chip Douglas") is a conduit for every lousy thing he's seen on television -- a "My Three Sons" fan with a dark side -- and lines from soap operas, sitcoms, and talk shows twist through his dialogue like menacing animated vines. But most of Carrey's bristle doesn't come from his line readings. His walk (it seems to be all joint and muscle), his glistening eyes, even his hair -- the way the light glints off the butch-wax peak of his dyed-black brushcut -- all seem slightly sinister and even more extreme than usual, as if Carrey had raised the stakes on his dare. Just as his character refuses to butt out of Broderick's life, Carrey seems to be saying that he's not going away either -- and he's so overbearing here that he's probably too much even for some of his fans. "The Cable Guy" has its moments: in one of the best, Carrey lip-synchs to Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love," warbling like a demented tropical bird in a parody of Grace Slick's loopy trilling. But director Ben Stiller doesn't know where he wants the movie to go, and Broderick has nothing to do but look incredulous as Carrey wreaks havoc on his personal life. What's more, the plot's structure just about sabotages Carrey: there's nothing for his jokes to bounce off of except Broderick's perpetually blank forehead. (I'm convinced that part of the reason Carrey was so terrific in "Dumb and Dumber" is that he and fellow dumb bunny Jeff Daniels, in a wonderful and almost completely ignored comic performance, were like perfectly matched cartoon squirrels.) Carrey's big flaws -- and his antsy, insufferable performance as the Riddler in "Batman Forever" just about sums them up -- are a tendency to fall back on too much prancing and mugging. But sometimes the problem is less with Carrey than with the vehicles themselves. He's consistently shot in close up, a mistake for two reasons: his facial expressions are larger than life to begin with, and close shots shut the audience off from what Carrey's doing with his body--a real drag, since Carrey is the most freakishly gifted physical comedian since Jerry Lewis. His twitchy, tough-dude walk was the funniest thing about his Ace Ventura, and as the title character in "The Mask," he was a swaggering Technicolor zoot suiter; he may as well have been swinging his sex on the end of a watch chain. In a frenzied dance number with Cameron Diaz, he spins around the floor like a dust devil with limbs, and yet even his restlessness shows a persnickety precision, and surprising grace. His intuitive physicality doesn't stop with dance numbers and stunts. Even if the first things you notice about a Jim Carrey character are merely cosmetic trappings -- prosthetic teeth, a goofy hair-do -- you always get the sense that he's invaded his characters from the inside in a sort of kamikaze run. You can trace a thread of annoying tics through each performance -- there's Grin #6, the one he does by stretching his lips too tightly over his teeth -- but so far, he's played each character differently. He's a suave/spazz hybrid in the Ace Ventura pictures, a cartoon dandy in "The Mask," an irritating jack-in-the-box as the Riddler. What's refreshing about Carrey -- and liberating about his third-grade-humor revels, particularly "Dumb and Dumber" -- is that even when he's laying jokes on us that a six-year-old would get, he refuses to be the cuddly Everyman comic. There's a spikiness to him that you don't see in, say, Jerry Lewis, who made a career out of playing the lovable loony. You can't imagine Lewis bilking a blind kid out of 25 bucks by selling him a dead parakeet, as Carrey does in "Dumb and Dumber." But even when he's playing nice, as Stanley Ipkiss, the Mask's milquetoast alter-ego, Carrey manages an easy charm without letting the character dissolve into a fuzzy mass of pathos. And Carrey's anything but elitist: he never condescends to even his silliest material. In a culture where so much of what passes for intelligent humor is merely smug and mindlessly ironic, Carrey refuses to play the game -- instead, he delivers a fart joke with almost Shakerlike simplicity and guilelessness. In "Dumb and Dumber," when he pours a whole bottleful of super-duper laxative into Jeff Daniels' drink, the lunatic gleam in his eye explains it all: You just can't get any lower than this. It's a naughty little pact between him and his audience, made without any superior winks or nudges. Depending on which side of the Carrey argument you stand on, it's a dream come true or your worst nightmare.

Stephanie Zacharek, a Boston-based writer,
last reviewed Sapphire's "Push" for Salon's Sneak Peeks.

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