Jim Carrey unleashes his anarchic talents in films with existential themes./MELISSA MOSELEY/WARNER BROTHERS PICTURES

By DENNIS LIM


It is customary to praise Jim Carrey as a genius of physical slapstick, the rubber-jointed heir to the silent-era antics of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and the frenzied convulsions of Jerry Lewis. But it may be more instructive to think of him as a master of the metaphysical.

Since his remarkable breakthrough year of 1994 - when he unleashed anarchy in“Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,”“The Mask”and“Dumb and Dumber,”which together grossed more than $700 million worldwide - Mr.Carrey has played a succession of heroes whose psyches have been cleaved in two, whose identities are dissolving or re-forming, whose sense of reality is subject to manipulation by forces beyond his control. His contortions and pratfalls seem to spring from some primal impulse or underlying pathology.

Mr.Carrey defies the comic archetype of the lovable lunatic. Most of his characters are not especially cuddly, and many of his films, broad comedies and serious dramas alike, are premised on mental disorders and conditions. They pivot on amnesia (“The Majestic,”“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) or multiple-personality syndrome (“The Mask,”“Me Myself & Irene”). Or they take the form of elaborate narcissistic fantasies, like“Bruce Almighty,”whose hero gets to exercise his God complex, and“The Truman Show,”whose hero is the unwitting star of his own long-running television series.

In his latest film,“Yes Man”(which opened last month in many countries), Mr.Carrey plays a miserable crank who embarks on a self-improvement regimen that compels him to say yes to everything. The character is yet another variation on a Carrey staple: an embodiment of the liberated id.

Based on a memoir by Danny Wallace, the film is also a selfconscious reprise of one of Mr.Carrey’s biggest hits,“Liar Liar”(1997), in which he played an amoral lawyer magically decreed by his son’s birthday wish to tell the truth for a full day.

Thanks to the huge and, for some, alarming success of “Dumb and Dumber,”Mr.Carrey was once held up as the emblem for the dumbing down of American culture. But he has always attracted serious-minded partisans eager to mount a highbrow defense of the lowbrow.

As far back as 1997 the critic Lisa Schwarzbaum had pinpointed his“existential loneliness”as the source of his pathos. Mr.Carrey is clearly drawn to heavily conceptual material. The either-or propositions that animate the plots of“Liar Liar,”“Bruce Almighty”and“Yes Man”have the stark simplicity and weighty significance of a philosophical fable or a Zen koan.

A high-concept movie requires a truly committed actor who can ensure that its central gimmick remains legible throughout. And Jim Carrey, love him or hate him, is never hard to read and nothing if not committed.

At nearly 47 he is a touch less sprightly, but he remains a jolting presence even in a pallid farce like“Yes Man,”which mainly confirms that, with the exception of“Eternal Sunshine,”Mr.Carrey has for some time now been stuck in films that are less interesting than he is.

The movie also arrives as he faces what could be a professional crossroads. The prevailing wisdom is that his career is in a comparative slump.

Mr.Carrey may be consciously steering his movies toward maudlin pop psychology. He has talked about his battle with depression, and has repeatedly advanced the notion that comedy is rooted in suffering. Promoting“Yes Man”recently, he made the startling declaration that“movies are made by people in pain for people in pain.”

In keeping with his existentialist inclinations, Mr.Carrey’s movies are almost all journeys of self-discovery, but in“Yes Man,”that journey begins and ends at the self-help shelf.