The juice is loose

An above-average movie, jealously maligned - for the wrong reasons. Incorrectly marketed, burdened by the speculation regarding the largest actor's salary in the world at the time, misunderstood by critics and panned by mongoloid fans who only wanted more Ace to sit on their face, The Cable Guy (at the time of its release) was routinely dismissed simply as The Film That Wasn't Worth A Twenty-Million Dollar Paycheck.

If your agent is savvy enough, if your producers can talk a good enough game to your funders, if the marketplace will support the burden, well - take the 20-mil and run! You're not going to be on that pedestal forever - you might as well luxuriate in that tax bracket if you've got the clout. Why did this capitalistic, supposedly democratic society vilify Carrey for that aspect? This is the American Way that those soldier grunts and duplicitous politicians are fighting for, no? Aspiring to a 20 million paycheck is exactly what all the flag-waving is about, is it not? Supporting this way of life, where a person can rise from a janitor to a job better than the President's. Right?

Highest praise to Carrey (and his managers/agents), not only for the circumstances that allowed him to secure that wage coup, but for the sheer talent he possesses which has so righteously been rewarded. (Rest assured, I'd be whining along with the critics if the excruciatingly unfunny Jason Biggs was in Carrey's shoes.)

But look around in 2004 - actors regularly draw above-20-mil paychecks because the bloated economy can now more readily support this hedonism. These actors do not even need to invest as much effort in their role as Carrey did for his Cable Guy persona, relying on marketing to tout them as "box-office draws," in a circular, self-fulfilling fiscal cul-de-sac, which feeds off itself and ultimately pats itself on the arse during Oscar season. Ironically, it is this commonality of avarice, this passé flippancy towards Hollywood's golden-haired elite, which allows The Cable Guy, in retrospect, to suffer less the slings and arrows of outrage over the 'greed' of its leading man. I say again, "Bravo!" to Carrey for pioneering the pack.

The movie and eponymous character are dark, foreboding, blackly funny and - like Kilmer's iconic Huckleberry Holliday - complete departures from anything anyone had come to expect from Carrey at that juncture in his upwardly-spiraling comedic career; critics and fans alike were taken aback at the frightening surrealism that Carrey brought to his disturbed character. The critics were too enamored with that 20-mil to delve any deeper than Carrey's 'offensive' lisp; and the contingent of arse-speak fans sat by numbly, waiting for an "Allllrighty then!" which would never come.

Admittedly, Carrey's hamming had reached King Kong-ian proportions by the time this movie hit cinemas, his two preceding films being Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (an excursion to the zenith of over-enthused surfwave-smirk and ultra-over-acting) and Batman Forever (where Carrey actually saved the movie from Tommy Lee Jones' attempt at Jack Nicholson and Chris O'Donnell's mannequin non-presence, with his over-ultra-supra Method); one of his lines in Batman may have summed up what many perceive as Carrey's shortcoming, when his Riddler character says, "Was that over the top? I can never tell!" Forthwith, audiences expected that slam-hamming to be carried over into The Cable Guy, which the misrepresentative trailers wrongly portrayed as such. Not having a convenient hole to pigeon this movie, marketeers and critics dismissed it as unfunny, dark, puzzling, simply because it didn't fit conventions or stereotype.

And here's the clincher - when Carrey played those over-the-top outré-hams in previous films, they stoned him for it; denigrating him as if from thrones of thespian munificence, yet when he subtly alters persona to portray someone more complex than the cartoon characters they begrudge him, suddenly they don't want him to change, because it taxes their stunted filmographic vocabulary to have to actually think about his interesting and layered role.

Watch for Owen Wilson (at that time, not yet The Nose That Saved Hollywood) as the insincere date; Bob Odenkirk, Andy Dick and Janeane Garofalo (Stiller's Posse), Jack Black (only hinting at the Tenacious within) Kyle Gass (as the Couch Potato!), Eric Roberts (in a screamingly-funny self-parody), George Segal ("Are you on the pot? You know you're killing your mother!") and director Ben Stiller himself, playing twins, parodying the Menendez Brothers tv murder trial/fiasco ("The killer was - Aaaaaasian!").

The makers of The Truman Show learned the lesson in not marketing that film as a "comedy," thereby allowing Carrey's acting prowess to shine, unburdening themselves from the pressures of public expectation. Indeed, The Truman Show is an extension of The Cable Guy's themes of alienation, false perception, reality misapprehended. That film's deeper psychological impact was so pronounced because we were now seeing Carrey as an Actor (not a comedian or overpaid janitor) in a role which extended the Cable Guy's predicament to seeking not only friendship - everyone in town was "pal" to Truman Burbank - but sincere friendship. Truman, like the Cable Guy, was a victim of illusion.

To any who may take cues from public consensus, heed not the simplistic puling of those who crudely decry The Cable Guy - view it for yourself, taking into account that it is merely a black comedy about a stalker; a lonely psychotic who will do almost anything for acceptance in the middle-class society he grew up alienated in. There is hefty psychological meat all over the movie, and its themes (underlying and overt) will leave you simultaneously disturbed and sated. Enjoy the movie's merits and let its faults be "movie" faults, not sociopolitical contrivances and jealous gossip.

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