To what extent can and should we separate the art from the artist? Those questions, much asked in recent weeks, rear their ugly head yet again in the course of the new Netflix documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond - or, to give it its full title, Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond - Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton. Chris Smith's film has a unique selling point in accessing previously withheld footage - shot for electronic press kit purposes, but most likely deemed too potent for promotional use - of Jim Carrey playing Andy Kaufman behind the scenes of the framebreaking 1999 biopic Man on the Moon. As was much discussed at the time, Carrey went full Method for the part, remaining deep in character as Kaufman and the comedian's multiple alter egos (bothersome lounge singer Clifton among them) even after veteran director Milos Forman called cut.
Lest we forget - and Man on the Moon has retreated from view in recent years - this thoroughly postmodern venture (memorably recreating scenes from Taxi with Kaufman's sometime castmates Judd Hirsch and Carol Kane playing their younger selves) emerged at the very end of a decade of unprecedented self-reflexivity, ten years that gave us The Larry Sanders Show, Pulp Fiction and Scream. Despite respectable reviews and a measure of awards buzz that peaked with a Golden Globe win for its leading man, the film numbered among several high-profile fin-de-siècle commercial flops that arguably prevented American cinema from pursuing a more adult and adventurous direction. The similarly toothsome Tom Cruise had the Mission: Impossible franchise to fall back on after Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut bombed, but Carrey's career would never quite be the same again. (Exhibit A: Dumb and Dumber To, an admission of creative defeat that arrived as late as 2014.)
Smith, whose own breakthrough arrived with the same year's American Movie, appears to have taken this project on at Carrey's behest, in part to offer a definitive answer to the presumably much-asked question of whether the star was just putting everybody on at the time. That answer is a big fat upper-case NO: Carrey-as-Kaufman can here be observed stirring the shit on set, disrupting rushes screenings, even grabbing the mic at the movie's wrap party. Some of what we see could be claimed as modestly amusing gonzo pranking: Carrey-Kaufman storming into Spielberg's office on the Universal lot and demanding to see the shark from Jaws, say, or plotting a (surprisingly successful) lookalike scam with regular Kaufman conspirator Bob Zmuda during a party at the Playboy Mansion. (Like I said, the film coincides with a lot of trending themes: Hef does not appear best pleased to be made a fool of on tape.)
Still, we can't help but sense something weird - abnormal, even - was going on around these soundstages. Early on, we see Carrey-as-Andy-as-Latka telling Kaufman's actual, bereaved sister Carol that he thinks the finished film will be a "healing" experience. ("For you, too," she replies, tellingly.) Watching the actor being a colossal pain in the arse (albeit a knowing pain in the arse) to his director, co-stars, Universal executives and passing civilians, you can kind of see why the studio didn't expend undue effort on promoting the results; while C-K received a modicum of onset pushback - most notoriously from Jerry Lawler, the pro wrestler cast as himself who, proving oblivious to the finer points of Carrey's Situationism, left the actor hospitalised following an all-caught-on-camera feud - it's hard, especially in the current climate, not to feel we're witnessing a minor-to-medium abuse of star power.
Smith duly interlaces the testimony of that star as he is today - older, beardier, more vulnerable, and just perhaps aware this period, however turbulent, was about as good as it got for him professionally. How you react to The Great Beyond - whether you see it as a document of a jolly jape or an altogether more troubling episode - may well depend on how you react to Carrey's latter-day assertion that "what happened... was out of my control". There is a strong whiff of self-justification here: early on, we're told this footage has been locked up in Carrey's office for nearly twenty years, and the understanding is that it's only being released now as clinching proof that the actor's genius is too great (maybe too dangerous) to be let out of the bottle. In one of his more emotional stretches of testimony, Carrey explains that he learnt all about compromise from his lovable milquetoast of a father, so was driven from a very early age to go to extremes wherever possible. (In a Nineties context, this presumably meant going beyond Ace Ventura: Pet Detective to Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls.)
Yet that testimony is intriguingly open - the Mask is very definitely off - and much of it goes to issues many of us are wrestling with right now. Given that most stars are born exhibitionists, do we allow them to behave like outright asshats - to push those around them, figuratively and/or literally - if it produces work as good-to-great as Forman captured? The Great Beyond is fraught both with that possibility, and the collateral damage it creates. Carrey reports that Michel Gondry, in the run-up to the pair's collaboration on 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, told him: "You're so beautiful, so broken - please don't get well." Carrey himself insists "suffering is so valuable". At risk of outing myself as a total normal, one whose pet movie hates include scenes where actors-playing-characters in extreme emotional distress start punching walls with their bare fists, I have to ask: but wouldn't you rather not suffer? (Furthermore: wouldn't we all prefer you didn't inflict that suffering on others?)
Without any shadow of a doubt, those issues remain too damn hot and knotty to be resolved in the course of a single 95-minute movie, but you should nevertheless see The Great Beyond, if only for its choice selection of cutaways to Carrey's Man on the Moon co-stars Paul Giamatti and Danny DeVito. Here are steady, dependable character performers rather than lightning-bolt stars: in this business for the long haul, sage enough to try and get on with the day job wherever possible and, in DeVito's case, experienced enough to have seen/suffered all this before with the actual Kaufman on the set of Taxi. Their expressions in the behind-the-scenes footage, however, are so openly baffled, bemused and cringey that they inevitably recall Laurence Olivier's advice to a neophyte Dustin Hoffman, struggling with his own Method on the set of 1976's Marathon Man: "Have you tried acting, dear boy?"
Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond is now streaming on Netflix; Man on the Moon screens on BBC1 tonight at 12.20am.
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