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But then Forman conveniently forgets about the discontent, instead focusing on Kaufman's increasingly odd routines and his alienation from people who used to support him, like "Saturday Night Live" executive producer Lorne Michaels (who also appears as himself). Late in the movie -- admittedly, after it's been suggested that Kaufman hasn't been getting as many comedy bookings as he used to -- we see Kaufman responding with dismay to the news that "Taxi" has been cancelled. But we have no sense of what he'd been feeling about the show, or whether his earlier misgivings had been resolved.

Similarly, we get some half-formed ideas about Kaufman's commitment to meditation and his rather robust sexual appetite. His relationship with collaborator Zmuda (the amusing Paul Giamatti) is sketched out in the most cursory manner. And Kaufman's girlfriend Lynne (Courtney Love) is introduced in a maddeningly offhand way and then treated throughout the rest of the movie as if we'll simply understand, with no explanation, her role in his life. She starts out as the first woman Kaufman wrestles on TV. Later we see her and Kaufman out on a date. Then suddenly she's a regular fixture in his life, but we have no sense of how this might have happened. Love has an exceedingly open, expressive face, but her scenes feel dropped into place -- they don't seem integrated into the rest of the movie.

What's most frustrating of all is that even Carrey -- Forman's star, for God's sake -- feels dropped into place. Carrey gets Kaufman's hunched, slumpy body language perfectly. His phrasing, with its pauses and tics, mirrors Kaufman's beautifully, even though he never comes off as a mere mimic. And then there's the way he gets that Kaufman look about the eyes -- that knowing simpleton's gleam.

But there's a disjunction between Forman's wanting to preserve Kaufman as an enigma and his efforts to show him to us as a human being, particularly when he's suffering through his illness and he and Lynne travel to a faith healer who might be able to cure him. Forman can't ask us to accept a character as an enigma and then expect us to react to his pain as if we were watching a melodrama.

None of us needs to be convinced to feel compassion for Kaufman and the illness he had to endure. But Forman just doesn't know how to integrate Kaufman the unearthly, mysterious genius with Kaufman the human being in pain -- or, perhaps, he just doesn't know enough to accept that they can't be integrated.

When Kaufman and Lynne seek out that cure, you see honest hope in Carrey's eyes, and it should be enough to break your heart. Or it should make you feel mildly uncomfortable, seeing a side of Kaufman that you'd never glean from his stage routines or his TV performances. But instead of either of those things, the moment just feels vaguely dishonest -- like a dramatized speculation about what a plane-crash victim might have thought about in his last seconds of life.

To be fair, Forman had the cards stacked against him from the start: How do you show the interior life of a man who was, to put it bluntly, just fucking weird? But "Man on the Moon," despite Carrey's brilliance, isn't even much of a noble failure. It's an ode to a man of mystery that's so maddeningly unfocused it comes close to diluting his genius.

The movie's title comes from a 1992 R.E.M. song, a sideways appreciation of Kaufman that is, in typical R.E.M. fashion, impressionistic and swimmingly amorphous, all loose strings and unsquared corners. It's an incredibly wistful song -- an elegy for someone who was taken before his time -- but it's not a sentimental one.

Somehow that song, even with all its unspecific poetry, manages to render a more intimate and heartfelt view of Kaufman than Forman's belabored movie does. "If you believe they put a man on the moon," R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe sings, the beginning of a conditional statement that never quite resolves itself. I can't explain in words what that line means in relation to Andy Kaufman, but then, I can't explain Andy Kaufman, either. I would have thought that space vessel would have taken him much farther from this world than the moon -- but maybe the point is that he's closer than we think.
salon.com | Dec. 22, 1999

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