In 1994, I took a pad and pen with me to the movies. I was ten or so and I wanted to keep notes and “review” them, just like Siskel & Ebert. Yeah, I was a nerd then and I’m a nerd now.
I remember a few of the movies I saw that year—Don Juan DeMarco, Forrest Gump, and Forget Paris among them. I also remember giving everything either three and a half stars or four, except Nine Months with Hugh Grant. I rated that one star. My mind has not changed on that score.
However, the movies I loved the most that year were the three films that catapulted Jim Carrey to fame: Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber. Carrey had many fits and starts in his career before this trifecta. He had (of course) done standup on The Tonight Show, was the lead in a sitcom (The Duck Factory), co-starred in a few offbeat duds (Once Bitten, Peggy Sue Got Married, Earth Girls are Easy). But most people didn’t really know what to do with him. Even Saturday Night Live rejected him, though he was snatched up by In Living Color. Regardless, Carrey’s manic talent was clear to only a few until ’94 turned out to be the year that would rocket him to fame as fast as the Beatles.
Ace Ventura (whose hairstyle I copied in the sixth grade—yikes!) seems tame compared to the silly comedies of later years. Unlike, say, an older Jack Black or Adam Sandler movie, it’s almost contemplative and strait-laced (even with the talking butt). It is no great film, but every scene is written, shot, and edited in such a way as to allow Carrey to show what he had. Many critics derided the thing and, had that been his solo release in ’94, Ace might have been the end. After all, it only caught on in the home video market.
The Mask is an almost criminally overlooked musical comedy. Stylish, with an excellent soundtrack, and some nice homages to the screwball animation of Tex Avery, it is probably the best of the three movies Carrey released that year. Dumb and Dumber does have ecstatic highs—it’s certainly the best Farrelly Brothers movie ever made (is that saying anything?)—but it also amplified the line between taste and crassness that Carrey has always straddled and its existence brought other actors into the sphere of stupidty. After Dumb and Dumber, a brilliant actor like Jeff Daniels could do a diarrhea scene and not be embarrassed about it. Years later, we have things like Robert DeNiro being Bad Grandpa. Save us.
By ’95, Carrey’s popularity had overtaken Robin Williams’ (another manic comedian, hard to reel in) and he found himself cast as the Riddler in the neon pony show Batman Forever, commanding a nice salary. This was followed by two rather bad movies (The Cable Guy, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls) and then, I believe, his strongest period commercially and artistically (1997-2004).
For my money, the perfect Jim Carrey comedies are Liar Liar and Bruce Almighty. For what they are, they work completely. They are nonsense, but well-balanced, and eventually moving pieces of nonsense. Plus, funny—deeply funny—with quotable lines throughout both.
However, for some reason, great comic actors get the temptation to try drama. Like the late comedian Norm Macdonald, I’ve often thought they should be happy with what they are. So few people are truly funny while almost anyone can play a dramatic scene. Even fewer people are good comic actors as opposed to comedians. That being said, comedies don’t win Oscars and the Eddie Murphies, the Robin Williamses, and the Jim Carreys of the world eventually want respectability (though that’s overrated).
Carrey merged onto the award track with The Truman Show, which I’ve always found a frustrating filmgoing experience. As for Carrey himself, you have a few moments of fan-servicing (weird noises/stupid faces) that prevent it from being a fully realized performance. It’s almost like he tried to feel vulnerability and then brought out the doofy smile when not fully comfortable with vulnerability as an acting concept. But the main problem with that film isn’t Carrey. It is too highly polished, much too commercial. If Peter Weir had directed it ten years previous, he might have made a masterpiece. As it is, it’s like Icarus—close, no cigar.
Carrey would continue to alternate from schlock (Me, Myself, and Irene) to dramedies (The Majestic) for a while until he finally let go of all the stupid and really knocked a dramatic performance out of the park. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of the great films of the twenty-first century, hits every note dead right. The unlikely pairing of Carrey and Kate Winslett is inspired, the writing rapturous, the sentiment (not sentimentality) is so moving as to disturb one’s life. Unlike The Truman Show, Spotless Mind never pokes fun at its internal rules. It plays a fantastical story straight and that’s part of what makes it deeply fine and moving.
You will notice I skipped Man on the Moon. It is, in some ways, my least favorite of Carrey’s movies (and I include Ace 2 in that assessment). Like the handsome Anthony Hopkins playing the creepy Richard Nixon, Carrey attempts a magical conjuring without looking one damned bit like Andy Kaufman. Regardless of the performance that emerges, you can’t believe it because there is no way the gaunt Jim Carrey could fill the jowls of Kaufman, who was a big man in a very different sense from the lanky Carrey.
But, regardless of the physical incongruities, you are so subsumed with Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman (and so aware Carrey was pulling his “art house” bit—as would be proved with that ridiculous documentary years later) that not even Kaufman’s spirit is given room to breathe in the film. Miloš Forman, otherwise a paragon of taste, chose to dramatize parts of Kaufman’s life that were already so well known that putting them in a movie makes the movie “Jim Carrey Re-enacts Kaufman’s Greatest Hits,” which would be a more apt title than the one it was given.
It’s a sad movie. It’s actually not a movie, but a vanity project on steroids. That’s what makes it sad.
Then, Mr. Carrey and I broke up. Or I grew up. I’m not sure which.
I sat stone-faced through Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Fun with Dick and Jane, The Number 23, the Seuss catastrophes…It was just too much. It was a fall from a great precipice. (Or I realized I’d rather watch something worthwhile; again—a crapshoot). I even missed what I am told are very good performances in Yes Man and I Love You Phillip Morris because I thought Carrey’s magic was gone. Or, more appropriately, that the magic was never really there.
Whether it was a Popper who owned penguins or a Wonderstone, incredible or otherwise, I stayed away. Even the cameos, like his Canadian newsman from Anchorman 2, elicited zero laughter from the large crowd who attended the screening with me. Carrey had become exactly like Robin Williams (as much as it pains me to speak ill of the dead). He was a comic actor turned one-time-great-dramatic-actor turned a hollow shell of a comedian.
Then there was what the man himself was becoming. I hesitate to even describe what “Jim Carrey” means to audiences of this day and age; he’s emerged as some guru. You’ve seen these TikToks that replay clips of him giving bizarre wisdom as if he had climbed down from a Tibetan mountain not caring any longer about what people think about him. Or just clips of him saying nonsense one hopes he is embarrassed by in the morning.
We are at the point where we know more about celebrities than ever. Some of them might as well pin their locations. Carrey reveals too much, but perhaps only reveals it because he knows it’s all over but the shouting. I mean, the Sonic.
It does seem Carrey is emerging from the “hermit hole” of his career, almost Brando-like: decrying the business of the business and getting paid empty millions for adaptations of Sega properties (though he certainly no longer commands the salary he did in the day).
As you can see, there have been many Jim Carreys we’ve (I’ve) had to reckon with: the weirdo, the A-lister, the Icarus, the faux Day-Lewis, the has-been, and the “old soul.” A few of them I loved rather dearly. (Let me reiterate that for a moment: I love this guy. I want him to be good. I want him to be happy. I want him to be content. I grew up with him. I idolize a part of him. He’s my friend. He drives me crazy!!!)
If Carrey had been content with moving comedies, I would’ve preferred many more years of Tom Shadyac films than films by Spike Jonze. He was born with such talent(!). It’s a talent that can’t quite be quantified. There is an electricity, a wildness, a doofiness too, that is lovable and marketable, and I’ll never understand squandering that. Though I cherish Spotless Mind, why he would neglect that talent in favor of never really being accepted as a dramatic actor, I'll never understand.
And yet what if he is, right now, just messing with us? In the style of his hero, Andy Kaufman?
Let’s take a moment and presuppose that perhaps the man really is wise, is happy, doesn’t care. Maybe, like Marlon Brando, he has realized acting isn’t all that important in the grand scheme (especially in a world such as ours, hurting and hurt).
Maybe he’s offered fewer roles because of his unnecessary attempt at method acting in Moon (“The Method,” by the way, is a global scam posing as quality acting training) (Ugh, that documentary whose name I shall not repeat here).
I call this essay a “reckoning” with Jim Carrey and I haven’t reckoned with him. I just wanna send him back to the factory and have him fixed.
And yet, I realize if anyone had made that happen, we wouldn’t have had childhoods where we laughed quite as much as we did. We would never know the giddy feeling of watching Fire Marshall Bill and we certainly would never have had Spotless Mind, where the casting of Jim Carrey is part of the miracle.
I love you, Jim.
I get mad at you too. But I love you.
Hope you’re out there doing what you like. You gave me Morgan Freeman as God and the best blooper reel of any movie I’ve ever seen (Liar Liar).
I love you, Jim.
I reckon so, at least.
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