Don't Laugh

By BRUCE HANDY/LOS ANGELES

By the standards of today's Hollywood, The Truman Show is unusual in that it has many levels of meaning. In one sense it is an allegory about the ways in which a performer can be imprisoned by the demands, even love, of an audience. If you are a movie comedian who is graduating to more substantial roles but is still most famous for having made teenage boys laugh by pretending to talk with your buttocks, this is an allegory to which you can surely relate. "To me, it's the saddest thing in the world to see a comedian at 60 doing the same character and the same act," says Jim Carrey, 36. His odd, moving performance in The Truman Show, an odd, moving film, should ensure that 24 years from now he will have more career opportunities than, say, Jeff Foxworthy.

In person, Carrey proves to be an open, reflective man. He exhibits little of the kinetic energy that got him to this career pass, although he does have an engaging way of slowly taking over the length of a couch with his rangy 6-ft. 2-in. body--not quite comfortably, not quite uncomfortably, half odalisque, half scrappy point guard diving for the ball. Unlike most people's, his face is more handsome the less animated it is; unlike most movie stars, then, he is better looking in person than onscreen (in another movie era, he could have been a male ingenue, another Ronald Reagan). Put him in front of a camera, though, and his engine starts to hum. During a photo session, his publicist takes him aside and asks him to resist the urge to strike zany poses now that he is promoting a movie without any fart jokes.

For the record, he is back together with his second ex-wife, the actress Lauren Holly. Their divorce, and her rumored affair with actor-director Edward Burns, made Carrey tabloid fodder--fishbowl living being another level on which he can relate to Truman Burbank. "I got in a fender bender on Sunset, and before I knew it there were paparazzi, because someone used his cell phone and made 300 bucks." He worries about media snoops planting recording devices in his hotel rooms--"So then you can't masturbate"--and worse. "Am I going to be combing my beard some day," he wonders, "and a little transmitter falls out?"

He is a famously avid reader of self-help books, and it shows when he says things like "The Magellan within all of us is going to save us." It's a reference not to mutual funds but to the Portuguese explorer, by way of The Truman Show, which Carrey likes to see as an allegory about self-actualization: "It's a hopeful story. It's about a man who will not be beaten. Presented with a challenge, he becomes the explorer he always wanted to be. In my best scenario, I want to turn out to be Truman Burbank. I want to turn out to be the guy who won't let himself be caged but still has hope and faith in people, and life."

For the foreseeable future, though, many people will still be disappointed if he's not "amping up," as he puts it, for the kinds of fearless, reckless performances he gave in the Ace Ventura movies and The Mask. "In this day and age, it'd be, you know, Van Gogh doing a movie, and they're going"--here he slips into one of his ominously enthusiastic character voices--'Why didn't he lop his other ear off? Sew it back on and lop it off again! We love that!'" The idea of change is one he returns to again and again: "My mother used to say to me, 'You're never satisfied.' And it's true." And later: "The choice is either you grow or you become the frightening mask of mirth."

Well, yes, one does think of Life with Lucy (as a general rule, the elderly shouldn't be allowed to mug). On the other side of the scale, Charlie Chaplin managed to grow into more sophisticated, more nuanced roles. So have Steve Martin, Robin Williams and Tom Hanks. Carrey, of course, already makes Tom Hanks money (he complains about studio execs trying to talk investments with him at parties), though he took less than his top $20 million asking price to do The Truman Show. The film represents his first stab at Tom Hanks prestige: middlebrow respect, a possible Oscar nomination, future roles where he gets to die or have a disability (he'll next star in a biopic about comedian Andy Kaufman, who died of lung cancer in 1984 at age 35). "This move has been well thought out and planned," says Jimmy Miller, who, along with his partner Eric Gold, manages Carrey. The team had long been looking for a "transition" script for Carrey. "To jump into a heavy war picture or a crime picture would have been crazy. It had to be something like Truman that blended comedy and fantasy into something with dramatic underpinnings. I think we all knew Truman was the perfect script."

And yet the project needed the bankable Carrey as much as he needed, or wanted, it. "I felt we had to cast a star, quite apart from whatever considerations the studio would have had in that regard," explains Peter Weir, the director. "It had to be a star to answer the question Why would people watch him?" Indeed, one of the film's more subversive--or maybe just less successful--aspects is that the TV show Truman stars in would, in real life, be unwatchably dull. Weir says he had been thinking about casting, oh, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks or Brad Pitt, when producer Scott Rudin told him Carrey was interested. Here was an unquestionably watchable star. "In Jim's movies," Weir says, "plot is relatively unimportant. His comic ability and his charisma are what hold the audience."

To anyone who has been paying attention to Carrey's career, the fact that he can handle complex material should not be news. His stand-up act had an emotional edge to it, and he was an effectively bruised presence as the son with a drinking problem in Doing Time on Maple Drive, a TV movie of the every-family-member-has-a-haunting-secret genre that aired on Fox in 1992. His ability to fully inhabit the creepy title character in The Cable Guy may have been what made that movie, his previous venture into somewhat more demanding fare, a box-office disappointment. Even his broadest comedies have their moments of genuine pathos. For instance: the scene in Dumb and Dumber in which, having briefly come to the end of his rope, Carrey's character stares out a window and says, "You know what I'm sick and tired of? I'm sick and tired of having to eke my way through life. I'm sick and tired of being a nobody. I'm sick and tired of having nobody." Sharing the scene with a bowl haircut and a chipped tooth, Carrey nevertheless evinces a real sense of despair. Director Peter Farrelly says the scene took seven or eight takes to get right; each time, Carrey's eyes welled with tears on cue. "His emotions," Farrelly says, "are at his fingertips."

"I don't cry on the inside" is how Carrey puts it.

On paper, he had a horrific childhood. Growing up near Toronto, he dropped out of school in his early teens after his father lost his accounting job and the whole family had to work nights in a wheel factory; for a time they all lived in a Volkswagen van. He describes the van part, at least, as being not all that bad, and discounts the easy conceit that there's an A-to-B line between childhood scars and his comedy, or anyone else's. Then again, he once did a bit in his stand-up routine that went like this: "What would you do if you found out your parents went to hell? 'Oh, my God--they taught me everything I know!'"

Colleagues describe a Carrey who is selflessly dedicated to his work, a perfectionist always looking for ways to turn a joke around and make it better, an endless fount of ideas. He, on the other hand, describes himself as someone forced to serve his fertile imagination as much as it serves him. As a kid, he says, "there was no place in the world I wanted to be except in my bedroom, drawing pictures. I got so lost in it that if my mother wanted me to do something normal, take the garbage out or anything, I would literally have a temper tantrum." It continues today, in a way: "I have to have an outlet. Always. Or I start having bad dreams." He's not joking.

"Jim has a very commercial form of mental illness," says Farrelly. "He's a very sweet guy--he's got a big heart, a lot of soul--but he's a tortured animal. My metaphor for Jim is a dog who's constantly beaten up by his owner. The dog can't figure out why. He tries everything to please his owner. He walks on his hind legs; he juggles. Nothing works. Then one day the circus comes along and scoops him up, and he makes a career out of it."

The upcoming Andy Kaufman film, to be directed by Milos Forman, will rub Carrey's nose in some of these issues. Late in his career, Kaufman orchestrated increasingly bizarre spectacles--onstage fights, misogynistic wrestling matches--in which audiences (not to mention friends and colleagues) were kept in the dark as to what was real and what was an act. "That's why he's such a comedian's comedian," Carrey says. "He never let anybody in on the joke. That's our sickness--the audience has to know we're kidding, otherwise they won't like us. That's why we do this. Andy risked not being loved." At times in his career, Carrey has risked that too, and he's mused about quitting altogether. "Maybe I'll turn 45, and suddenly I won't need people to tell me I'm great anymore, and I'll just go off in another direction completely." It would be nice to grant him that serenity. But why should we let him go?