‘Bruce Almighty’

Bestowed with god-like powers, Jim Carrey uses his cockeyed charisma in a film with a fresh premise.   [PG-13]

By: Elise Nakhnikian

"Jim
Jim Carrey exploits his newfound omnipotency for practical reasons in Bruce Almighty.


   Bruce Nolan (Jim Carrey) is a local TV reporter who provides comic relief for the news, doing funny features about things like giant cookies. His fans love his one-liners, and his sweet, pretty live-in girlfriend, Grace (Jennifer Aniston), loves him, but he’s too busy longing to be a "serious" newsman to appreciate what he’s got.
   When he’s passed over for a promotion to anchor, he blows up on camera, gets fired, and then rails about the cosmic injustice of it all. This gains the attention of God, who shows up in person (as Morgan Freeman) to nudge his lost sheep into line. Just as you’re about to file his intervention with this self-pitying whiner under "moves in mysterious ways," God offers a reason for having singled Bruce out. "You have the divine spark," he says. "You have the gift for bringing joy and laughter to the world."
   To teach Bruce a lesson, God lends him his divine powers. True, he only puts him in charge of part of Buffalo, but that’s a big enough playground to kick up plenty of sand. Bruce uses his omnipotence to make women’s skirts fly up to expose their panties, enlarge his girlfriend’s breasts, morph his old beater into a sleek sports car and manipulate events to get ahead of his rival at work. The stunts are often clever, but they’re sophomoric and selfish. As God patiently explains: "Parting your soup isn’t a miracle, Bruce; it’s a magic trick. You want a miracle? Be a miracle."
   It’s a neat little premise for a PG-13 comedy: fresh enough to hold your interest but familiar enough to be comforting, with a clearly stated moral and a happy ending that’s never in doubt.
   It may also be a good metaphor for Carrey’s career. Watching the actor in this movie, you get the feeling that he, like Bruce, may be making peace with the notion that his role in life is to "lower and debase myself for the amusement of strangers."
   As Hollywood realized long ago, Carrey is a force of nature. The powerful appeal of his rubbery-faced, cartoon-like doofuses, especially to the 18- to 34-year-old boys in the bull’s eye of the studios’ target audience, made him the first actor to earn $20 million for a movie back in 1995. In movies like The Mask and Me, Myself and Irene, the studios got healthy returns on their investment. But Carrey, like Bruce, seemed to resent being typecast.
   He racked up a number of dramatic credits between comedies, but his serious movies have rarely done well. The Majestic, the story of a young man who develops amnesia and wakes up in a small town whose good people teach him Valuable Life Lessons, drowned in its own syrup. Man on the Moon, a wonderfully weird biopic in which Carrey seemed to be channeling otherworldly comedian Andy Kaufman, was too unsettling to be commercial, and Doing Time on Maple Drive, a sensitive TV soaper about an unhappy rich family (Carrey convincingly played the depressed alcoholic son), came and went without much ado. Only The Truman Show found the right mix of head and heart to attract a mass audience.
   In Bruce Almighty, Carrey seems to have found a new balance between serious and silly. As in Liar Liar, he plays a glib charmer shocked into reforming after a supernatural act changes his life, but while he emoted more than Celine Dion in the first movie, he plays this one almost straight. (The only over-the-top Jim Carrey routine here is performed by The Daily Show’s Steven Carell, who plays Evan, Bruce’s rival for the anchor spot.) Without exaggerated expressions or emotions, Carrey looks surprisingly ordinary, an average guy but better looking, as people in the movies always are. And when he does explode, his on-air outburst is funny, but it’s poignant too: You feel embarrassed for him. Even his romance is plausible, for once.
   Carrey’s comedies always pair him with stylish, warm-hearted women, who often seem better suited as sisters than sweethearts to his clueless dweebs and oily creeps. Aniston’s Grace, a sweet girl with real backbone, seems too good at first for Bruce, but the two feel like a match by the end of the movie, as Carrey melds the cockeyed charisma of his funny roles with the sincerity and sweetness of his serious ones. This character still has that "divine spark," but he doesn’t appear to have dropped through a hole in the sky from some other universe.
   Bruce is a pleasure to watch because its actors are used so well. Crafted by Carrey’s old friends Tom Shadyac, who also directed Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Liar Liar, and writer Steve Oedekerk, who co-wrote Ace Ventura, it lassos the star’s prodigious energy better than any other movie he’s done. Aniston taps into the girl-next-door charm that made her a favorite on Friends to light up a character who could have just seemed cloyingly virtuous. And casting Morgan Freeman as God was pure genius. Simultaneously stern and loving, grave and lighthearted, his bemused deity could raise outspoken atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair from the grave and make a believer of her.
Rated PG-13. Contains profanity, sexuality and some crude humor.