‘I Hold Myself In Contempt!!!!!!!!’ Surely, any number of exclamations cannot bring in the effect that he brings, when he says this particular line towards the climax of the movie ‘Liar Liar’. Jim Carrey is truly a man of thousand faces. He has this unique ability to express certain raw emotions using some of the most peculiar facial expressions. Be it frustration, or ecstasy, or power, or fear, or defeat or any other wild emotion, Jim has enacted them all. He is one actor, who can express real pain through his acting alone (a combination of body language, facial expression and voice modulation) unlike most who use touchy dialogue written primarily to choke the audience to tears. Real pain?
But Jim is supposed to be a comedy actor. True, He has acted in some of the funniest English movies ever. But they are mostly more than just comedies. Usually there is a hint of some other underlying basic human emotion. And rather typically, the hidden emotion is either frustration or repression; big enough to wake up the wild animal inside any man. Jim is hardly the super hero in his movies. (only exception being Ace Ventura.) He is the loser contemplating his life in ‘The truman show’ … The nice guy whom girls use to sharpen their cleats in ‘The Mask’ … The silently suffering repressed person in ‘Me, myself and Irene’ … The unlucky frustrated guy in ‘Bruce Almighty’ … All these are the kind of roles that a common man can identify with.
Jim is one of the few actors who apart from being great actors can also give the emotional depth needed to make a role more human. I had wondered how come he alone is able to do that. Then, I read in a magazine that Jim’s childhood was rather a troubled one. He had experienced the pain in poverty before making it big in Hollywood. May be its all those sad events that happened in his past that fuels his performances in most of his movies. It is true that some of the greatest creative work had been done by people who had seen the worst of life. And I think Jim is one of the best examples for this.
I have watched many of his movies. I loved his performances in ‘The Mask’, ‘Liar Liar’, ‘Me, myself and Irene’, ‘Dumb and Dumber’, ‘Truman Show’, ‘The Grinch’ and ‘Bruce Almighty’ (I haven’t watched ‘Eternal sunshine of a spotless mind’ yet) which is almost all the movies of Jim that I have watched. (Excluding ‘Ace Ventura’, which according to me, did not have any emotional content) These are all the special movies in which only Jim could be the protagonist, because only these kind of roles do justice to the amazing talent that he has. For these roles provide plenty of chances for enacting a wide range of human emotions, which is typically Jim’s major strength.
His characteristic brilliance cannot be fully appreciated by people who prefer a posh deception for a facial expression rather than a raw, real one. It is sad when people pretend not to take notice of the emotions that he conveys using those weird techniques. But again feelings and emotions are easily the most taken-for-granted things in the world. According to me, Jim Carrey is one of the greatest actors of Hollywood. There is definitely no one like him …
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