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WARNING: Contains mild Bruce Almighty spoilers!
Strap in, Jim Carrey, because this Fame Audit has been a long time coming.
A little background: here at Fametracker, we try to "peg" our content to its subjects' current offerings. And at several points in the life of this site, we have noted Jim Carrey's various projects and mused that it might be time to audit his fame. But there was only one problem: in four years, neither of the site's editors was willing to go see any of Carrey's movies.
Looking back over the movies Carrey has released since FT launched, one hopes our readers can sympathize with our hesitancy or outright refusal to see them. Me, Myself & Irene -- a sub-There's Something About Mary most notable now for (briefly) uniting co-stars Carrey and Renée Zellweger offscreen. Man on the Moon, Carrey's second (after The Truman Show) Oscar-begging embarrassment. Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas -- Ron Howard's poorly punctuated 105-minute-long whiz all over Boris Karloff, Chuck Jones, Dr. Seuss, and our childhoods. And finally, The Majestic, failed Oscar bid #3. In every respect other than box office, the past four years have yielded four big disappointments from Carrey.
So, the best thing we can say about Carrey's current film, Bruce Almighty, is that it's the first Jim Carrey movie we've been willing to pay to see since The Truman Show. Unfortunately, we were as wrong about Bruce as we were about Truman. Which, I guess, means we'll be ready to give Jim Carrey another chance 'round about 2008. Because Bruce Almighty isn't...that good. It's not horrendous or anything -- we've certainly seen worse movies this year -- but it's just so generic and unexceptional; it could just as well have been called High-Concept Comedy #842. There are some good parts; they're easy to find because Steve Carell is in all of them. (Surely, that's just a coincidence.) But the rest of the movie is so relentlessly average that one can't help wondering how, on material so uninspired, Carrey has managed to ascend to his current position in the Hollywood pantheon.
Granted, Carrey didn't make his name playing normal guys in standard-issue summer comedies. Carrey first distinguished himself as the breakout star in the sketch-comedy series In Living Color -- a format that allowed him the space to perform a wide range of his manic, over-the-top characters. Carrey projected to the back of the hall, and beyond; his energy was seemingly boundless and apparently unmodulated.
But here's the thing -- and it's a lesson Carrey's comic predecessor Robin Williams also has yet to learn: while scampering around like a chimp with ADD may be charming and fun in a four-minute interview on a late-night talk show, in a full-length movie, it bugs. And in film-acting terms, the opposite of "funny" doesn't necessarily have to be "mawkish." Not only that, it is possible and indeed preferable for a film actor, in a single performance, to exhibit more than one emotion. Like Williams, Carrey has built a CV stacked with two kinds of movies -- ones in which he's wacky and antic, and ones in which he's serious and sentimental, with virtually no overlap between them (except in the case of sentimental movies about real-life people who were often wacky and antic -- like Man on the Moon, or Williams's Good Morning, Vietnam).
Maybe the problems that exist in Carrey's recent movies don't lie entirely with the actor; certainly, as we said above, feeble screenwriting doesn't help. But the question is -- particularly with Carrey's alleged comedies -- why he keeps signing on for movies that, with a few tweaks, would work just as well as vehicles for Rob Schneider. Carrey is not a terrible actor. He is capable of being funny. He just doesn't know when to quit, and has evidently never been directed in his comedies by anyone with the stones to explain to him that screaming catchphrases isn't enough to get the job done. It's as though, like Williams, Carrey has this idea that the way to make a mediocre script work is to overact so hard that the strain shows in his neck veins and the audience fears he may be having a cardiac episode. One of the nicest moments in Bruce Almighty is a fraction of a scene in which Carrey and Morgan Freeman are quietly mopping a floor together, in tandem. The moment has grace and symmetry and, above all, silence. Carrey's movies would be a lot better if there were more of that in them.
(Carrey's movies would also be a lot better if he weren't such a damn hog. Honestly, why even bother casting a talented and deceptively subtle comic actress as Jennifer Aniston as The Girl in Bruce Almighty when she doesn't get to do anything funny except (if you like that sort of thing) press her newly enlarged boobs together? Why take Steve Carell away from The Daily Show so that he can be in, like, a scene and a half? Was there more of Carell and Aniston that had to be cut so that Carrey could wow us with his Clint Eastwood impression? Hey, Jim, we all learned in kindergarten how important it is to share. Why didn't you?)
If we were assessing Jim Carrey's fame five years ago, we would have said he was exactly where he should be. Back then, he had done a respectable number of successful movies, some of which (Dumb & Dumber, The Cable Guy) we really liked, and even held up as examples to our doubting friends that even when he seemed to be acting stupid, Carrey was obviously very clever. Since then, though, he has apparently lost the ability to choose smart (if silly) projects that tested his talents and wouldn't work as well if anyone else had done them. Liar, Liar could have been a Robin Williams movie. How the Grinch Stole Christmas would have worked with Mike Myers in the title role (which we'll see, soon enough, when Myers appears in The Cat in the Hat). Bruce Almighty would have done just as well as a cookie-cutter summer release for Eddie Murphy. Adam Sandler may not take risks very often, but at least he made Punch-Drunk Love last year; if Jim Carrey doesn't start alternating his high-concept comedies with better material that doesn't rely so heavily on all the tics he honed on In Living Color, he's going to evolve from his generation's Robin Williams into the next generation's Chevy Chase.
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