Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls
When Ace Ventura: Pet Detective was released last year, the clip circulated to the review shows featured Jim Carrey bent over at the waist proffering his clothed behind. Using his hands he opened and closed his butt cheeks, turning them into a mouth, and thus the talking ass moved from the playgrounds to the cinema screens. Knowing critics would hate the flick, Carrey made a preemptive strike: Siskel and Ebert complaining on At the Movies about the clip couldn’t help but come across as stuffy and uptight. After all, what further insights can critical analysis bring to a talking ass? Rendering the critic’s job ridiculous also made questions of acting moot. A performance is often judged by its level of difficulty, its uniqueness: nobody else could have pulled off Linda Hunt’s character in The Year of Living Dangerously, Daniel Day-Lewis’s in My Left Foot, or Tom Hanks’s in Forrest Gump. Yet ironically, according to this commonplace, Carrey should be an Oscar winner–his physical contortions are beyond even Daniel Day-Lewis’s. Nobody else could have starred in Ace Ventura or The Mask.
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Jim Carrey is a Tex Avery cartoon come to life, a loose-limbed, rubbery phenom. The fluidity of his impersonations and transformations makes him the most brilliant physical comedian to come down the pike since the manic Jerry Lewis. Physically he’s a throwback to a slapstick style that’s supposedly dead; verbally he perfectly suits the current Age of Irony. To this mix he adds a sophomoric, lowbrow humor, broadening his appeal (late-night television comedy has proved the magical power of the words “penis” and “ass” in pimping for laughs). By mixing modes, by uniting the contemporary with the traditional, he’s generated a persona that not only combines Dick Van Dyke with Bill Murray but appeals to everyone who laughs at bathroom jokes.
Ace is funniest when the other characters on-screen don’t know how to react to him. Is he insulting them? Is he joking? Or is he just eccentric and stupid? And at the same time that we identify with Ace’s bewildered victims, we also identify with the bewildering Ace, which makes for a complex, effective comic interaction. In Pet Detective, when Ace delivered a package, in the midst of his hyped-up behavior he was still making semireasonable requests–“Please sign here. And here. And here. We’ll send the rest of the forms in the mail”–that almost legitimized him. The victim of these requests, not knowing he was being made fun of, signed dutifully. But too often in When Nature Calls the victims have no such doubts, responding to Ace with harrumphs and reddened faces. When Ace first sits down in front of a slide projector with his head in the center of the light beam, the other characters are caught off balance, unsure whether Ace did it intentionally. Watching them being toyed with, squirming and trying to size Ace up, is funnier than seeing them rear back angrily and exploding, as they do when the gag continues with Ace’s dick jokes. Ace’s victims are victims no more–they can dismiss him because he’s just a jerk trying to piss them off. We can dismiss him too.
