Sean Connery decided that his final film would be
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
(2003).
Gene Hackman said goodbye after the lackluster
Welcome to Mooseport
(2004).
And, for two years, Jim Carrey (Ontario, Canada, 62 years old) has been a member of the club of legends who close their careers in an anticlimactic way, who, one day before the premiere of
Sonic 2: The Movie
in April 2022, surprised announcing that he was retiring.
"I have enough.
I have done enough.
“I am enough,” he declared in an interview with
Access Hollywood
.
"I'm serious.
“I really like my quiet life, I love painting and my spiritual life.”
The comedian, however, left the door open to a return: “If the angels sent me a script written in gold ink, that I felt was really important to people, I could come back.”
A few weeks ago, the project capable of bringing Carrey out of his exile arrived: it was announced that he will be in
Sonic 3
.
In addition to sowing unfulfillable expectations around the script of the third installment of the saga based on the Sega video game (premiering in December), the confirmation of the end of Jim Carrey's retirement has coincided with the 30th anniversary of
Ace Ventura, a Different Detective
, the film that, after its release in February 1994, catapulted him to fame.
That comedy (and character) was the kickoff to a year of glory for the actor, who in a few months chained two other phenomena of the caliber of
The Mask
and
Dumb and Dumber
.
The following year he played the villain Enigma in
Batman Forever
, filmed the sequel
Ace Ventura: Africa
and, by 1996, he was already the highest-paid movie star in the world thanks to the $20 million he received for
Crazy Man at Home
.
More information
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The rest of the story is known.
A textbook embodiment of the sad clown cliché, Carrey felt in need of recognition as a dramatic actor and headlined prestigious projects (
The Truman Show
in 1998,
Man on the Moon
in 1999) for which his critics forgave him;
not the Academy, which never nominated him for an Oscar.
His biography covers problems of depression, from which he said he was freed in 2017, short-term relationships and the suicide of an ex-girlfriend who was 23 years younger, using drugs prescribed in his name.
He had an anti-vaccine period and another as an author of political satires – which found its peak in his confrontations with Trump and Mussolini's granddaughter – although where he has enjoyed special fame is in self-help, thanks to his taste for motivational speeches. and the inspiring stories, like the one he has repeated so much that in 1985 he wrote himself a check for ten million to convince himself that he would win it and he carried it with him until he cashed it, a decade later, for Dumb and
Dumber.
Jim Carrey and model Lauren Hutton in 1985.Vinnie Zuffante (Getty Images)
Portrait of Jim Carrey in 1985.Aaron Rapoport (Getty Images)
His career, at the same time, has been more strange and erratic than that of a typical star.
With a less consistent filmography after his first decade of success, Jim Carrey has played with his public image in disconcerting, if not uncomfortable, interviews, without it being clear how much was
performance
and how much was boredom.
His myth was boosted in 2017 with the premiere of the documentary
Jim and Andy
, made up of material that, according to the star, Universal had withheld since the late nineties so “that people wouldn't think he was an idiot”: the images from the filming of
Man on the Moon
, where for weeks he wreaked havoc by behaving like his character, alternative comedian Andy Kaufman.
In addition to sparking debates about method acting (there was violence in the documentary, with Carrey being knocked unconscious in a fight, and many of his colleagues were clearly upset), that film renewed interest in the destabilizing undercurrents of Jim Carrey's humor and opened up other ways from which to understand his legacy.
Contain crowds
Carrey's rise in 1994, after years attracting attention in performances,
sketches
and supporting roles, coincided with the peak of
grunge
(it was the year of Kurt Cobain's suicide) and the commercial emergence of the new punk, generational factors difficult to dissociate.
Ace Ventura, a Different Detective
, which had a script co-written by Jim Carrey, featured a loud, energetic, angry, constantly outburst character who ridiculed all the serious adults around him and talked out of his ass.
A parody of
thrillers
– its transphobic ending, which has aged the worst, is still a legacy of
Dressed to Kill
(1980) and
The Silence of the Lambs
(1991) – the film was about a detective specializing in animals who had They have to locate the kidnapped mascot of an American football team, a dolphin, before the Superbowl final.
Carrey's gift for transforming his face, body and voice at high speed led to his physical work being compared to the work of Tex Avery, whose violent and histrionic animations served as the basis for
The Mask
.
The three films that the actor starred in in 1994 were consequently adapted into cartoon series.
The Finnish academic Tarja Laine published
the article
The King of Shame in the
CineAction
magazine in 2001 , where she investigated the source of the actor's comedy.
Actor Jim Carrey with his then wife, Melissa, and daughter Jane, in 1991. Richard Perry (Sygma via Getty Images)
Jim Carrey with a nice American woman at an awards ceremony in Los Angeles in 1991. Ron Galella, Ltd. (Ron Galella Collection via Getty)
“Carrey is sociologically provocative because his art is based on the shame and embarrassment created by a tension built into social interaction,” he wrote.
“Just as Jerry Lewis, by masochistically making shame and self-humiliation the basis of his comedy, Jim Carrey turns the entire process of formation of the bourgeois subject on its head.
Shameful pleasure seduces the spectator to participate in this abandonment of ego stability in a spectacle of abjection.”
The analyst admitted her disappointment at the dramatic turn in Carrey's role choices, whose dilemma she saw captured in
Me, Myself and Irene
(2000).
In that comedy by the Farrelly brothers, a repressed police officer suffered a split in his personality, from which a chaotic and aggressive alter ego emerged that he had to fight to contain.
“His films break fewer and fewer cultural taboos.
Carrey's career is at the same crossroads and it remains to be seen which personality he will ultimately overcome, the conventional or the anarchic?
Contacted by ICON 23 years later, Laine, currently a professor of Film Studies at the University of Amsterdam, regrets that one thing or another did not happen: “The fact that she did not receive an Oscar nomination for her roles in
Forget About Me!
[2004] or
Man on the Moon
can be seen as a symptom of Hollywood's rigidity.
It's a shame that he didn't play more serious roles later, that most of his comedies were formulaic, and that now he's acting in a franchise inspired by a video game.
It may be due to poor work by his agent or personal reasons.”
“What made Carrey unique was his ability to extract humor from not necessarily funny situations, especially negative and uncomfortable emotions,” he explains to ICON.
“He did something similar to what the Farrellys tried to achieve in their films: a carnivalesque liberation from the norms of conduct, in the spirit of Mikhail Bakhtin [Russian thinker for whom the popular expressions of buffas represented opposition to the rigid vision of aristocracy]. ”.
The infinite joke
In an extensive profile published in
Rolling Stone
in 1995, journalist Fred Schruers had the opportunity to portray that Jim Carrey who settled in Hollywood, during an interview session in the middle of the filming of
Ace Ventura: Africa Feature
.
The article also spoke about the wife that Carrey was divorcing after eight years of marriage, with whom he shared a daughter born in 1987. The woman, Melissa Womer, stated that her still husband suffered from deep depression and that the nights with Him crying into the wee hours of the morning was common: “He doesn't really want to do what his adrenaline pushes him to do.
I still love him, he has what legends are made of and he has simply lost his way.
I am worried about him.
I have learned that the smile he wears is the greatest mask of all.”
Lauren Bacall and Jim Carrey, holding in his hand the Golden Globe he won for 'The Truman Show'.
Vinnie Zuffante (Getty Images)
Courteney Cox and Jim Carrey at the premiere of 'Ace Ventura' in 1994.Ron Galella (Ron Galella Collection via Getty)
“I don't think there's a single creative person in the world who doesn't have extreme ups and downs,” Carrey responded.
“Otherwise, you're boring.
Some of the best work I’ve done has come from those downhills.”
The text delved into the legal battle over his estate, with his wife's lawyer stating that Carrey did not want to grant an amount that he earned in a few days due to a family trauma: his father was unemployed and bankrupt when I was a teenager.
Jim Carrey himself experienced his first violent attacks at that stage, when he and his brother were going to vandalize the factory where his mother was being exploited.
The actor said in the piece that he supported his family during and that, for this reason, he had recurring dreams in which he strangled his mother.
In another profile for
The Hollywood Reporter
in 2018, signed by Lacey Rose, he seemed much more at peace.
She was then promoting the series
Kidding
, her first fictional work after the suicide of her ex-partner.
Playing a child television presenter in an existential crisis, director Michel Gondry used a personal moment of Carrey's similar to the one that motivated him to recruit him for
Forget About Me!
, when he went to meet him on the set of
Like God
(2003) and found him devastated by her breakup with Renée Zellweger.
“My plan wasn't to join Hollywood, it was to destroy it,” he recalled of his early days.
“Hit a giant sledgehammer against whoever was in charge and against all seriousness.”
He also insisted in the interview that he did not want to return to the front line.
Jim Carrey at the premiere of 'Sonic 2' in Los Angeles.
Axelle/Bauer-Griffin (FilmMagic)
However, the
Sonic
movies (2020 and 2022) have brought him two of his biggest commercial successes.
His character, Dr. Robotnik, has also allowed him to return when no one expected it to a style of interpretation along the lines of
The Mask
, excessive and cartoonish.
In the book
Memories and Misinformation
(Today's Topics, 2020), co-written with Dana Vachon, Carrey established the professional point of no return for him in
Phillip Morris, I love you!
(2009), which had problems distributing due, among other reasons, to a scene where he was seen having anal sex with Ewan McGregor.
As a result, the actor says that Disney and Paramount froze projects with him and suggests that his agents forced him to do
Mr. Poper's Penguins
(2011) because, according to them,
Ace Ventura
showed that "people love to see him." with animals".
As in so many aspects related to Carrey, it is difficult to know how much truth there is: the book is in the form of a fictional novel with aliens, peppered with biographical data (he recounts dreaming about strangling his mother) and recognizing how great loves Linda Ronstadt – with whom he had a relationship when he was young, she was 15 years older – and Renée Zellweger – whom he invents left him for the bullfighter Morante de la Puebla.
In the end, a cataclysm leads her to experience an epiphany where she sheds her individual identity.
Something that seems in line with the introspective interview he gave to Jimmy Kimmel in 2017: “Jim Carrey is a great character and I was lucky to get the role.
But I no longer think he's Jim Carrey."
“I've never cared about being funny,” he delved into
The Hollywood Reporter
.
“For me, what matters is the experiment of the day.
If you enjoy it, fine, if not, fine too.
There will be another tomorrow.”
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