Who doesn't know Jim Carrey?
Let's play a game. What do you associate his name with?
Some with The Truman Show for sure, some with some of his recent interviews, some with his incredible involvement in playing Andy Kauffman in Man on The Moon, some fine palate with The Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless mind.
But I think 90% of you will identify him with his very wide smile and his crazy, delirious and demented performances in The Mask, Ace Ventura and Dumb + Dumber.
Start from this vision of the actor Jim Carrey and you will slowly discover what Kidding is about, the latest TV series airing on Showtime starring the actor.
Directing the first episode is Michel Gondry, father of If You Let Me Eternal Sunshine of the Spottless Mind, considered by many to be one of the best films in the history of post-2000 cinema.
This is the reconstitution of a combination that had made known to the world the skill and intensity of Jim Carrey in a dramatic role and since then the aura of Jim has definitely become mysterious, dark and gloomy.
The life and career of the actor of The Mask are unique in the Hollywood panorama, as well as an artistic and human memento mori for everyone. Carrey himself has often recounted the evolution, for some involution, through cryptic phrases released during interviews and worrying situations, but at the same time they have led insiders and outsiders to more than one reflection on what Hollywood and the world of entertainment represent: a farce.
And that's why no one better than him could have played the protagonist of Kidding, a man in mourning who is a victim of his work. A father orphaned of his son but who is the most famous person in the world when it comes to entertaining children. A familiar, reassuring, joyful and smiling face that every day enters homes all over America to entertain and make children dream with puppets, songs, nursery rhymes and colorful puppets.
This is the world that children want to know, or rather, this is the world that the great television industry wants to make known to children.
A beautiful, colorful, safe, fun and pleasant world where there are no mishaps, no pain, no suffering.
Mr. Pickles (Jim Carrey) has experienced first-hand that that world does not exist, that all it takes is one distraction to have a child taken away from you, that all it takes is a single loss to shatter every certainty and hope in life.
What do children know about death? Who ever prepared them for this inevitable card that life will sooner or later play at every table?
Mr. Pickles wants to embrace his pain and make sure it wasn't in vain, to make sure that what happened to him can be used by everyone else to prepare for tragic contingencies, to welcome joys and sorrows in life and dispel the myth that if you don't talk about something then that something doesn't exist.
Mr. Pickles wants to talk to children about death and in doing so he wants to prepare them for life. He would like to use his position to be a guide in the world for the little ones. He would like his program to use that colorful world he has built to deal with all of this.
In doing so, he will have to clash with and convince his producers who, while empathizing with him, will ask him to separate the Mr. Pickles father and man from the Mr. Pickles Brand of a hundreds of millions of dollars company.
No death in his shows, no life. Just nursery rhymes, just smiles, just gum faces.
The power of Kidding lies in framing in such a dark and deep plot the Jim Carrey man and character. A person stuck in a plastic character in a context where everything is built to sell dreams, sell fantasies. Jim has experienced first-hand what it means to be a Brand, what it means to be a victim of one's own characters, what it means to discover in private that what appeared in public was only a mask, a farce behind which were hidden delusions, foolishness and evils of a society made of chronically unhappy individuals. That's why Jim Carrey is perfect. That's why in every scene he pierces the screen and seems to tell us his story, behind a mask that this time seems to be the one that reveals his natural and genuine identity. That of a man adrift, without something to give meaning to his existence that desperately tries to get out of character, to escape from what the world wanted him to be but that he is not and does not want to be. A powerful series, destabilizing to see, hear, listen, feel and understand frame by frame in search of a desperately distant meaning that we seek every day in our lives in color.
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