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 Jim Carrey in "Fun With Dick & Jane." |
NEW YORK -- Dressed casually in a Buddha T-shirt with a draped black suit, Jim Carrey could be a poster boy for serenity.
But he's starring in a comedy about a dad who loses his job and just about everything else -- a premise guaranteed to give him the odd uncomfortable flashback.
The funnyman stars with Tea Leoni in Fun With Dick & Jane -- a remake for the Enron era of the 1977 Jane Fonda/George Segal film about a downsized couple who take to robbing banks to keep from losing their home.
And those familiar with his early days in and about Toronto know the story of Carrey's dad losing his job when Jim was 12 -- a termination that had the family living in a van and in tents before things got better.
"The way (the couple in the film) handles it is funny. (There's a migrant labour experience, a Wal-Mart/Costco minimum-wage spoof, etc.) But the story itself is not a funny thing for people to experience," Carrey says. "Disaster struck my family and I saw what that does. I was angry at the world because somehow it conspired against my father. And that was my focus. It changed me and gave me an edge that I use all the time. It's there."
Produced by Carrey and directed in full slapstick mode by Dean Parisot, Fun With Dick & Jane is set in 2000, pre-Enron and 9/11. Carrey plays Dick Harper, a cheerful company man with faith in the system, who is promoted up the ranks to be a fall guy for a crooked CEO (Alec Baldwin), and who finds himself unemployed with no pension after the company collapses.
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The timing is deliberate, and again Carrey says it parallels his own experience. "I was skating along and having a good old time. Not that I didn't have problems, but I didn't believe in catastrophe. And the bottom fell out and it was happening to us and we were in a van."
Similarly, Fun With Dick & Jane points to 2000 as America's last year of innocence. "Since 2000, so much has happened in the world. People started waking up and noticing, 'Ohmygod we're all part of the Corporation! I'm part of the Corporation, you're part of the Corporation, we're all hooked into it. When does it end? How corrupt are we? How long can I eat from a rotten apple before I swallow something that hurts me?' "
He means the U.S., of course. Carrey became a U.S. citizen a little more than a year ago. Though Carrey visits relatives semi-regularly and says he's proud of his roots, he's not plugged into Canada enough to voice opinions on the politics here.
But he's not an uncritical new American. "What's going on overseas has very little to do with the ideal that is America, I believe. I think there's a lot of corruption right now and this movie deals with a lot of that. And the basic corporate conglomerate that is America is out of control in certain ways. But I'm proud to be here. This country's given me huge blessings. I'm happy to be here, and I'm happy to be Canadian too."
But yeah, he's got a thing about corporate malfeasance. Of indicted former Enron CEO Ken Lay, Carrey says, "I think there's a giant God-shaped hole in him that can't be filled, and he's trying to fill it with money."
Ironically, Carrey is one American who was hardly affected by such chicanery. One hangover from his past is "I don't play the stock market a lot. I'm very safe when it comes to investments and things like that."
Of course, if there are real parallels between Carrey's loss of innocence and the American one, then Americans should all be millionaires real soon. He could never have planned to be as rich ($20 million per film) or as famous as he has become. The night before his interview session at the Waldorf-Astoria, he says, "I get a lot of love from people, but occasionally they ask for too much. I was in the restaurant in the hotel and some guy who looked incredibly dignified walked up to the table in a three-piece suit said, 'Al-righty then!' (from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective). And he started doing the whole 'Al-righty then' thing, and he's like, 'C'mon, do it, do it, do it!' And I'm like, 'I'm eating, but nice to meet ya.' "
And as for every American becoming rich, don't think Carrey hasn't thought of it first. "I think everybody should get rich and famous and everything they ever dreamed of, so they can see that it's not the answer. You get famous and say, 'Well, if I do just one more thing that's really successful,' then one more thing after that, and then you just start getting tired of being disappointed in the outcome as far as your emotions go. 'That was a fantastic hit, but what now?'
"Thank God I learned that lesson. Only a moment with my daughter will make me happy, or having dinner with people I love. Or expressing yourself in a kind of cool way that connects with people, because there've been times that, honestly, you go, 'Why am I doing this, I don't need to work again.' And it always comes back to me that I love thinking about that person in the seat. That's why I do it. And that's enough of a reason to get out of bed in the morning."
A scan of his filmography suggests commerce isn't Carrey's No. 1 priority. He has let others star in sequels to The Mask, Dumb And Dumber and Bruce Almighty (Steve Carell will be starring in the latter). And it must be said that some of his serious turns -- including The Truman Show, Man On The Moon and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind -- were Oscar-worthy and unjustly ignored.
So it's somewhat of a surprise to see him doing a remake in an era when there's a glut of same.
"I hate (remakes) most of the time," he says. "But I was seduced by the idea. It's more relevant today than it was then. And I thought it could be fun for me and a really good actress to have a rebellious romp."
His next few projects are definitely outside of the box, starting with The Number 23, a thriller that speaks to his obsession with that ostensibly transcendent number.
"It's a thriller about a guy who finds a book, and the book is about a character who's obsessed with the number 23," Carrey says of the film, which starts shooting with Elizabeth Shue in January. "And this number is haunting (the character) and leading him to do very bad things. And this guy starts to notice parallels between the book and his life.
"I've had this obsession with the number 23 for years, and it was passed on to me by a friend. He talked about the earth's axis being on the 23rd degree and everybody having 23 chromosomes from each parent. And he has books on everything that added up to 23. As soon as he told me that, I started seeing 23 everywhere." There's also the 23rd Psalm, which Carrey says "has become my mantra a bit."
He's also in talks with Tim Burton to star in a movie about Robert Ripley, of Believe It Or Not Fame, an adventure comedy in the Indiana Jones mold.
"It's whatever turns me on at any particular time. I don't want to say I will never do a sequel, because then if I do it would be, 'Oh look now, he's selling out!'
"But I always lean in the direction of, 'I'm living now, and this next year of my life I could create a new character and do something new and express something different. And I'm gonna spend a year going back to that same thing?' If it's just a corporate decision to kind of soak up the gravy of the first one, that's no reason for me to do something."