Chuck Russell’s comic-book comedy exists to let Jim Carrey behave like a Tex Avery cartoon, and when he does it is a delight. Everything else, the gangsters, the bank job, the love story, is scaffolding, and the film knows it.
Chuck Russell’s The Mask has one idea and it is a good one: what if Jim Carrey were allowed to do everything his face has always threatened to do. Stanley Ipkiss, a bank clerk in a comic-book town called Edge City, puts on an old wooden mask and becomes a green-headed spirit of mischief who can stretch, spin, shoot and dance like a Tex Avery wolf. The scenes in which he does this are a pleasure from start to finish. The scenes in between are a wait, and there are more of them than a 101-minute film should need.
When the mask is on, the film is as good as its reviews. The effects, credited to Industrial Light & Magic, are used for jokes rather than spectacle, which is why they still work. The Mask sees Tina Carlyle across a nightclub and his eyes leave his skull, his heart hammers out through his shirt and his tongue unrolls across the table. He turns a balloon animal into a tommy gun. Frisked by Kellaway, he produces from his pockets a bicycle horn, a bowling pin, a bazooka and a photograph of the lieutenant’s wife, and Arthur Coburn cuts each object on the beat of the gag so that none of them outstays its laugh.
Carrey is the point and he knows it. As Stanley he does a soft, slumped decency that is almost too much; as the Mask he is a whole Saturday morning of cartoons in one green body, and he sings and dances “Cuban Pete” with a line of armed policemen as if he had been waiting his whole life to be asked. Peter Riegert is the film’s second-best joke. He plays Kellaway with a flat, tired face that refuses to react to anything the Mask does, and the more Carrey spins the funnier Riegert’s stillness gets.
We laughed out loud, more than once, and the hardest at the frisk. It is a scene with no plot in it at all, one man emptying his pockets in front of another, and it is the best thing in the film because Russell trusts the joke to keep going past the point where a nervous director would have cut away. That kind of confidence is rarer than the effects.
Craig Stearns builds Edge City as a town where it is always night and has always just rained, the streets green and purple under the lamps and the Coco Bongo a box of gold and red inside. Ha Nguyen’s yellow zoot suit is the film’s best costume and very nearly its best character. John R. Leonetti lights Stanley’s flat like a damp bedsit and the Mask’s scenes like a stage, and the difference tells you where the film’s heart is. Randy Edelman’s score brings in the brass when the mask goes on and settles for strings when it comes off, and the strings are the weaker half.
The trouble is the crime plot. Mike Werb’s screenplay gives Dorian Tyrrell a bank to rob, a boss called Niko (Orestes Matacena) to overthrow and a girlfriend to lose, and nothing to be beyond a man who scowls. Peter Greene scowls capably. The reporter Peggy Brandt (Amy Yasbeck) has a thread the film keeps picking up and putting down again, and the mechanics who cheat Stanley (Tim Bagley and Johnny Williams) exist to be punished. Every time the mask comes off we are back in the flat with Stanley and Milo the dog, and the film sits down heavily and waits for him to put it back on. By the third visit to Dorian’s back room we had begun checking the runtime, and we resented it, because ten minutes earlier we had been laughing.
Cameron Diaz, in her first film, is more than a decoration. She plays Tina as a woman who has worked out what her looks are for and is tired of it, and she and Carrey are easy together in a way the script has not really earned. The Jekyll and Hyde comedy is an old shape and this is a perfectly sound one. What the film adds is the idea that a comic-book town should be funny as well as dark, which in 1994 was not the fashion.
Watch it with a child of about ten, or with the adult who was ten in 1994 and will know every line. It is a PG, and it runs 101 minutes, of which perhaps sixty are the film everyone remembers. The other forty are the price of admission.
