World's Only Living Toon

By RICHARD CORLISS

He is the movies' new $7 million man, the year's surprise star, but Jim Carrey still approaches an interview as if he were auditioning for the roles of all three Stooges and a couple of minor Marx Brothers (Zippo and Gonzo?). On a high balcony of Los Angeles' Ma Maison hotel, the star exhausts successive teams of reporters and photographers with his giddy verve. He not only entertains them, he outmans them, peopling the place with dozens of nutsy, improvised characters.

"O.K.," the current photographer suggests, "now just be yourself. Show me who you are."

Carrey pauses, scans the floor, shrugs and says, "Who knows?"

It's a good bet that this Carrey -- the ventriloquist who wonders poignantly if he has lost his own voice -- is a bit of a gag too. The Canadian comic, 32, has been having too good a time lately to search for the Inner Jim. And so has anyone who has seen Carrey inhabit dozens of roles on Fox's prime-time skitcom In Living Color or commandeer the big screen in last winter's smash Ace Ventura Pet Detective. That rowdy farce, cagily directed by Tom Shadyac, earned $72 million at the domestic box office. Coupled with big expectations for Carrey's new fantasy-comedy The Mask, it kicked the actor's price from $750,000 to $7.5 million for headlining Dumb and Dumber, due early next year. He will also pocket $5 million as the Riddler in Batman Forever.

In The Mask he plays Stanley Ipkiss, who puts an ancient mask on his face and is transformed from bank-clerk dweeb to zoot-suited superdude, genially terrorizing Edge City and winning the plushly encased heart of a gun moll (Cameron Diaz). The computer wizards at Industrial Light & Magic help alchemize this ragged film into a megamorphic extravaganza. But Carrey doesn't need any cybernetics or silicon to rubberize his limbs. He is his own best special effect, the first star who is a live-action toon.

What Robin Williams does with his mind -- rev it up, kick it around, bend it and blend it, find witty twists at lightning speed -- Carrey does with his body. He walks in sections, as if he had been pulled apart and then basted back together. He can freeze into an exclamation point or, doing his trademark hula, go all loose and noodle-y. Imagine a goyish Jerry Lewis with less ego and more self-esteem and you have Carrey. Crossbreed Lewis' The Nutty Professor with Batman and you have The Mask, with Carrey breathing life into director Charles Russell's tatty fable.

Carrey doesn't distinguish between action and dialogue; he is hyper doing both. He can turn the simple act of listening into power aerobics. His laser stare becomes maniacally penetrating; turning to hear a question, he nearly gives himself whiplash. Then he speaks, with an overbearing precision that suggests Maxwell Smart ranting through a bullhorn. And now he's off again, pogo-sticking or jackknifing about, slipping into his impersonations of Clint or Geraldo or a female bodybuilder or a charred fire marshal. He's a cool doofus -- a grownup version of the class clown.

That's just what Carrey was at school in Toronto. Exasperated, one teacher simply gave him 15 minutes to perform at the end of the school day. "I'd chew up a pack of heart-shaped powdered candies," he recalls, "then act like I was sick and throw up every color of the rainbow. For no reason, just that I could do it. " Jim had material for more scabrous satire: his alcoholic grandparents. "I'd imitate them, and the family would be crying from laughter. I'm, like, 10 years old, doing these alcoholics."

Jim's father gave up his vocation as a saxophonist for the ostensible security of being an accountant, but he lost that job, forcing the family, including Jim, then 13, to do factory work and live in a camper. "It made me realize," Carrey says, "that life offers no assurances, so you might as well do what you're really passionate about."

That meant pursuing his weird, wired muse at Toronto's and then Los Angeles' comedy clubs. "At first he would just mug and jump around," says Michael Becker, a pianist who occasionally worked with Carrey. "Then he began writing stuff down, shaping an act that was basically who he is today." Along the way, Carrey married a former comedy-club waitress (they are divorcing; he sees their six-year-old daughter three days a week). He now dates Picket Fences Lauren Holly, his costar in Dumb and Dumber.

After that movie comes Ace 2 and maybe Mask 2, but Carrey sees more in his life than sequels. He wants miracles. "When I was a kid, we couldn't afford a bicycle," he says. "So I prayed for one. A week later, I come home, and in the living room there's a Mustang bike I'd won in a raffle I didn't even enter. Life keeps doing that for me. If I wanted something, I asked for it -- and it's come to me."

Now, after a 15-year wait, Carrey is a star, complete with Brentwood home (two blocks from O.J.'s). But he is one Hollywood success for whom the trappings of fame don't seem to matter much. "I live in my head," he says. "I seriously do." The maintenance might be high there; the neighbors might complain about those strange noises. But for everyone else, Jim Carrey's head is a funny place to visit.

With reporting by Dan Cray/Los Angeles