I forgot,” he sheepishly replies, revealing the film’s central insight: There was no there there. Script’s key exchange has Kaufman complaining to his g.f., “You don’t know the real me.” “There isn’t a real you,” she says. Kaufman, whose presence is so irritating that he’s even kicked out of his transcendental meditation group, seems bereft of true personal connections, and certainly of a romantic life, until he meets Lynne Margulies (Courtney Love), who eventually moves in with him.īut even this relationship has a shaky foundation. Although Zmuda was the comic’s closest collaborator, the man comes out of nowhere and it’s never shown how they got on the same productive wavelength. The nature of Kaufman’s personal attachments remain as sketchy as his career affiliations. Show’s co-star DeVito is otherwise occupied in the picture, which quickly loses sight of the popular series at the end, one has no idea Kaufman actually stuck with the show for six years. ![]() ![]() “Taxi” co-stars Marilu Henner and Judd Hirsch appear as themselves, and Peter Bonerz plays show’s director. On “Taxi,” Kaufman is seen as a highly disruptive prima donna, especially in his insistence upon special guest appearances by his gross and vulgar Las Vegas character, Tony Clifton, which he concocted with friend and writer Bob Zmuda (Paul Giamatti). This quickly leads to the offer to join “Taxi,” which Shapiro has to goad Kaufman into because the latter professes to hate sitcoms. I don’t even know what’s funny,” Hollywood agent George Shapiro (Danny DeVito) takes him on and gets him a “Saturday Night Live” gig. Despite difficulties in pigeonholing Kaufman’s talent and the performer’s own protestations that “I’m not a comedian. Quick biographical droppings suggest that the Long Island, N.Y.-bred Kaufman was an early blooming weirdo whose initial forays in performing were met with the same quizzical reactions that greeted him throughout his brief career. It’s a bizarre little intro brimming with the promise of absurdist lunacy, promise that is never subsequently approached or fulfilled. Perhaps the film’s best minutes come in the opening sequence, a black-and-white performance piece in which Carrey’s Kaufman apologizes (prophetically) to the audience for the film being bad and announces, “This is the end of the movie,” whereupon the final credits start to roll as Kaufman plays a record. All the audience is left with is the impression of a thoroughly obnoxious man you’d never want to meet in real life, a hopeless neurotic of little discernible talent other than for making the lives of those around him miserable. ![]() ![]() But in addition to failing to get a fix on Kaufman, the script sorely lacks shape and a dynamic, and pic gives no sense of the passing of time. Given their idiosyncratic treatments of the lives of Ed Wood and Larry Flynt, there was reason to hope that the lively approach of screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski would give dimension and distinction even to the unlikely figure of Kaufman, by all accounts a strange man, who made a name for himself in the TV series “Taxi” and died in 1984 of cancer at the age of 35.
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