07.02.23
Jim and Andy is the rare occurrence of the documentary being much better than the film it is based on.
I think Man on the Moon is a ‘fine’ film, although I always felt it was rushed and compromised in its portrayal of Andy Kaufman’s life. In Jim and Andy, we see the reality of the film’s turbulent production and just how stressed Milos Forman was having to deal with Jim Carrey and his exhausting channeling of Kaufman and his alter ego, the abrasive Tony Clifton. It’s unbelievable to think that this shell of a man on screen was the same man who directed Amadeus and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Like just in Man on the Moon, Carrey takes centre stage and is almost the complete focus of the audience’s attention. Now much older and wiser, Carrey bares his soul in a series of selected extracts, intertwined with excerpts from his impressive and lovable filmography. What makes Jim and Andy so good is only partly to do with the original film footage, and that the main spectacle is witnessing Carrey’s emotions shift and his face contort with each heartfelt comment.
It’s the only film I can think of which shows one person commanding four ‘performances’ (old Jim, new Jim, Andy and Tony), which when you consider scenes in The Mask and The Truman Show, give a sense of Carrey’s mental state as his career quickly accelerated in the nineties. It’s an incredibly revealing but accessible documentary which shines a light on a beloved but cerebral movie star.