Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond - Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton (2017)

Chris Smith's documentary assembles twenty-year-old behind-the-scenes footage of Jim Carrey refusing to stop being Andy Kaufman and pairs it with a present-day interview in which Carrey sits in a chair and explains the universe. The archival material is the good part. Carrey terrorizes the crew, baffles Danny DeVito, and reduces grown men to tears by simply remaining in character through lunch. It is a study of method acting, studio anxiety, and the patience of Miloš Forman. The film has no interest in anything else.

That narrowness is, on the evidence, total. The cast and subjects are the real people who made Man on the Moon, which means a great many white men in polo shirts, and the film never pauses to remark on it. Race, sexuality, gender, climate, class, and the politics of the body are simply not on the menu. There is one industry anecdote about Universal withholding footage to protect Carrey's image, which gestures toward corporate self-interest without ever building a case against it. The documentary cares about fame, identity, and the strange costs of pretending.

Where the film does drift toward sermonizing, Carrey himself is doing the drifting, offering cosmic observations about reality and the self that land somewhere between insight and a very long acceptance speech. His psychological dissolution into the role is treated as artistic obsession, which is accurate and also the end of the inquiry. The result is a well-liked and genuinely entertaining document of a peculiar professional episode, carrying almost none of the cultural freight we have come to expect from the past decade of nonfiction filmmaking. It is a film about a man who became another man. That is the whole of it.