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Bill Murray: In Cold Blood
Bill Murray is an oxymoron: a suave comic. With the release of Cradle Will Rock and the bizarre Rushmore, he reckons he's just been through "a sort of artistic period". But Murray keeps on getting better whatever movie he's in, argues Richard Kelly
"What the hell kind of clown are you?"
"The crying-on-the-inside kind, I guess." (Quick Change, 1990)
One of the finest US comedies in years, Wes Anderson's Rushmore is still a tough sell to the multiplexes, if only because it escapes definition. Call it a high-school romance if you wish, in as much as it concerns the nascent yearnings of a dynamic tenth-grade geek called Max Fischer. But the emotional hub of the piece is Max's unlikely pal, industrial concrete tycoon Herman Blume. Introduced in Anderson's and Owen Wilson's screenplay as "a tough-looking guy about 50 years old," Blume acts as half-hearted benefactor to Rushmore, a private school he was too poor to attend. He sports a 'Semper Fi' tattoo from service in Vietnam; he's a chain-smoker, and a moody drinker. Married to a woman who disdains him, quietly appalled by his roughneck sons, Blume - pregnant with a listless, punched-out mid-life gloom - finds himself longing for some of Max's earnest brio; longing too for the woman Max loves, widowed first-grade schoolmarm Rosemary Cross. Thus do the millionaire and the prodigy become bitter rivals.
It's not a role designed to flatter a star's vanity or serve him laughs on a plate; nevertheless, Anderson and Wilson wrote it for Bill Murray. "I thought he'd be funny, and real," Anderson has explained. "And also there was a sort of a sadness about him." Murray admired the script, and signed up for a fraction of his usual fee. "I took a flier," he told Esquire. "I think they paid for my hotel room, but it was like, 'If it does okay, you'll be okay.' Which never means anything." Undaunted, Murray turned in a beautifully muted performance that mines humour from pathos.
Murray 's willingness to efface his world-famous comic persona as a straight-faced, smart-mouthed, slightly cold-blooded clown is well known to his seasoned admirers. But those of you who tuned out of his career somewhere around Ghost Busters (1984) might be wondering at what point cinema's most celebrated wiseacre started coming on so wounded and wistful. The date is worth establishing because this has been, by common consent, an unusually brilliant 12 months for the 48-year-old Murray. Rushmore won him a fistful of Best Supporting gongs from the various US critics' clubs. As a lovelorn ventriloquist fighting to save vaudeville from the Federal Theatre, he is quite the best thing in Tim Robbins' The Cradle Will Rock. And shortly we will see him as Polonius, urging contradictory counsel upon Ethan Hawke in Michael Almereyda's modern-dress Hamlet. In a recent interview with on-line magazine Mr Showbiz Murray was blithe about why his stocks have soared of late: "I've just gone through a sort of artistic period where I've done a few art movies in a row." He reckons that the critics started to sit up around the time he went toe-to-toe with Robert De Niro in John McNaughton's Mad Dog and Glory (1993), as a lonesome loan shark addicted to stand-up comedy and psychoanalysis. That terse, tight-laced and impressively threatening turn was hailed in some quarters as a major change of spots. Yet Murray himself insists it's always the same job. "To play comedy," he asserts, "you have to be able to play straight." Dissenters may take such insouciance as proof that even the best clowns have only a small bag of dramatic tricks at their disposal. In fact, Murray simply has a superior grasp of how less can be more, in comedy specifically, and movies in general.
Like Steve Martin he has a literate edge to his craziness, and an evident urge to thwart public expectations. Unlike Martin, however, Murray shows no interest in being adorable, or in playing the father of the bride. Instead he has regularly proved his readiness to work with idiosyncratic young talents, in awkward roles on improbable labour-of-love projects. Who could have foreseen him as the waxen, white-suited, stunningly epicene Bunny Breckinridge in Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994)? But Murray regards such escapades as needful relief from the treadmill of mainstream movie-making - and success has gratified his desire to be choosy. Clearly he has a nose for good writing; collaborators attest that his 'notes' are uncommonly rigorous ("You can't let other people's standards get you down," he has warned). Twenty years after his debut, he is still the funniest white man in movies. What's his secret?
A decade ago the notion that Bill Murray's best work could be in soulful service to a script like Rushmore was inconceivable. After all, Murray became a superstar of the late 70s and 80s via a series of scatter-brained comic vehicles wherein he always stood one wily step ahead of what he was expected to say or do. He mastered the enviable trick of seeming to slouch into the spotlight, picking his moment to pronounce deadpan upon the laboured idiocy of the proceedings or to launch into some lunatic speech of motivation to his troops. Like many comics of his generation he assumed the posture of a countercultural lord of misrule - but unlike them he made it look effortless: no prat-falls, no food-fights, and no question that he would be going home with the girl.
In fact, Murray's disparaging approach to screen romance was possibly the most endearing facet of his comic persona. In Meatballs (1979) he charmed his sceptical leading lady with a stream of endearing nonsense and spontaneous physicality. In Stripes (1981) he prodded a pretty military policewoman into bed using a spatula. In Ghost Busters he calmly weighed the risk of intercourse with a demonically possessed Sigourney Weaver ("I want you inside me"/"Sounds like you have at least two people in there already"). This kind of cajoling madcap seduction became a Murray trademark; his characters have always wagered on laughter as the best aphrodisiac, no doubt conscious that clowns otherwise have a hard time getting laid.
True, Murray may have looked an unlikely romantic lead. His screen smile was profoundly untrustworthy: that of a man with swamp-land to sell you, and designs upon your daughter. But it also promised an agreeable ride. His physiognomy is unmistakably Irish; there's something pugnacious and unfinished there. His hairline has been receding modestly for more than a decade. But Pauline Kael wrote early and aptly of his "doughy handsomeness". And at 6 foot 3 inches he is authentically lofty, though that slouch has tended to efface the fact. Yet his movement on screen has always been remarkably deft: like his infallible timing, an indication that he knows his way around a stage.
Cinderella story
Murray has no relish for the confessional interview, and those in search of the facts in his case are only cautiously referred to a newly published memoir, Cinderella Story: My Life in Golf. Of course the title refers to Caddyshack (1980) and Murray's widely venerated turn as greensman Carl Spackler, a slack-jawed stoner who dreams of holing out from the eighteenth fairway at Augusta while scything the heads off rhododendrons. A prized fixture on the US pro-celebrity golfing circuit, Murray likes to befuddle interviewers by insisting on the centrality of the game to his state of mind. ("Every year I say I'm gonna play more. But then a movie comes along, and I can't get serious about golf.")
It's no joke, though: Murray's older brother Brian had a hand in Caddyshack's script, and in the raucous, extended Catholic family of the film's young hero we may discern certain biographical strokes. Murray was born and raised in Wilmette, Illinois, his father Edward a lumber salesman, his mother Lucille a redoubtable child-bearer ( Murray was one of nine surviving siblings). Instilled with the working-class precept that nobody will do you any favours in life, he emulated his elder brothers in earning a buck towards his school fees by odd-jobbing around the local golf clubs. He devotes some relatively gag-free passages in Cinderella Story to the revelation that the Wilmette course was overshadowed by a temple consecrated to the Persian faith of Baha'i - and this is a prize nugget for those who have spotted how the twin pursuits of sporting glory and spiritual peace frequently entwine in Murray's oeuvre. A kind of inscrutable Zen-gamesmanship has always been part of his repertoire. (Consider Spackler's claim to an indulgence extracted from the Dalai Lama after caddying for His Holiness in the Himalayas: "He says, 'Oh, there won't be any money. But when you die - on your deathbed - you will receive total consciousness.' So I got that goin' for me. Which is nice.")
Endearingly, Murray testifies that a high-school staging of The Music Man enticed him off the fairways and into showbiz. From that point, he may be read as a product of a formidable comic lineage and of that unjustly maligned era, the late 60s. He dropped out of college and pre-med studies not long after being busted for possession of marijuana at Chicago's O'Hare airport. In the early 70s he followed brother Brian in getting himself apprenticed to Chicago's semi-legendary Second City troupe, specialists in scripted satire and improvised comedy since their formation in 1959. Nichols and May, Alan Arkin and Alan Alda were the star alumni of the early 60s, but now a younger, rowdier bunch of self-professed radicals were coming through the ranks: John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis. Murray learned fast that improvisational skills were dearly bought. "I was so bad," he has recalled, "I walked off and didn't come back for, like, two years. Then I just lived a little, and came back with a lot more person to operate with." Murray's perseverance paid off. He has reminisced that his early movies (usually scripted by Ramis, or Aykroyd, or both) were reinvented each morning on set, over coffee in his trailer; and his joyous, uncredited performance as sardonic foil to Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie (1982) is believed to have been more or less ad-libbed. Inevitably he was snapped up for the radio and stage revues sponsored by National Lampoon magazine, and then by NBC-TV's Saturday Night Live, during its second hit season in 1976-77. Murray was drafted as a replacement for anchorman Chevy Chase, who was planning to patent his brand of stoned suavity for the movies. Belushi was poised to follow, and court a college-age audience with National Lampoon's Animal House (1978).
For a while SNL relied upon Murray as an amiable foil to the combustible Belushi, and he bridled quietly at the chore. Gradually he patented his own persona: a shifty showbiz insincerity, evinced in regular spots as the unctuous host of 'Celebrity Corner' and as a succession of schmaltzy lounge-singers, all called Nick. As SNL producer Lorne Michaels has recalled, "When Bill was onstage, he didn't much care whether they liked him. Because of that, he had enormous integrity." One could take Murray's fearless pose as a form of ironic hip; as a bite on the hand of the corporate entertainment machine now feeding him; or as a sincere homage to the non-ingratiating manners of the comics he has professed to admire: Bob Hope, Jack Benny, George Burns. Nevertheless, such "integrity" seemed unlikely to charm the mass of moviegoers.
Determined weirdness
But Murray made a smart choice in his movie debut, the low-budget Meatballs, co-written by Ramis and directed by canny Canadian Ivan Reitman. As a shaggy, sardonic counsellor at a cut-price summer camp, Murray put his terminally unserious persona at the service of the little guys: a bunch of lonely, sad-sack kids needing a shot of self-esteem. In his best moment Murray impersonates the director of the neighbouring rich-kid camp, and brags deadpan to a television interviewer about the perks on offer ("Yasser Arafat is coming, just to rap with the kids. Then we have Sexual Awareness Week"). Like all good clowns Murray was setting himself on the side of the helpless and the hopeless, acting as the scourge of stuffy officialdom. Accordingly, he made for inspired casting as countercultural dangerman Hunter S. Thompson in Art Linson's Where the Buffalo Roam (1980). Patched out of an assortment of Thompson's seminal Rolling Stone journalism ('The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat', 'Fear & Loathing at the Super Bowl'), the movie was ragged, but the choice bespoke a determined weirdness in Murray. He seized upon Thompson's daffy sports-fan attire, his staccato diction and heroic toxicity ("I hate to advocate drugs, liquor - violence, insanity - to anyone. But in my case - it's worked").
Tellingly, though, Buffalo could offer no convincing retrospective upon the 60s. Its humour was that of stoned alienation: a sign of the long retreat from what the counterculture had dared to dream of in 1968. Meanwhile, Saturday Night Live was showing how such alienation, succoured by huge success, could shade into a smug hipness. Caddyshack, which set its sights no higher than the piss-elegant manners of private golf clubs, was a virtual compendium of SNL taste, and terribly confused about what it was rebelling against. "Nixon plays golf," sneers one pretty young thing, as if the wretched Dick were still the demon of the hour. But this was 1980: presidents Ford and Carter had come and gone, Ronald Reagan was installed in the Oval Office, and SNL lamentably failed to nail the new sheriff, contentedly spoofing him as a bumbling dotard rather than the damnable liar he so surely was.
Scads of money
Murray surfed the zeitgeist. In Stripes, another Ramis-Reitman opus and a runaway hit, he was Winger, a slovenly cabby who signs himself over to Uncle Sam and shapes up under the gimlet eye of drill sergeant Warren Oates. The high-jinks culminated in a harum-scarum mission behind the Iron Curtain, as if to alert us that a new era of war fever was firmly afoot. Murray had the decency to make mincemeat of the martial gibberish he was required to spout, but clearly he was coasting. This was confirmed by Ghost Busters, an SFX-laden paint job on an old Abbott and Costello shtick which again made scads of money. Playing Dr Peter Venkman, Murray stepped into boots first fashioned for the late Belushi - and Ramis and Aykroyd, co-stars and co-writers, generously assigned him to run away with the picture. Yet such was their confidence in Murray's Teflon charm that they seemed careless of what a mean cove Venkman actually was. Here was a character one would gladly see lynched in some kangaroo court of political correctness: an unabashedly lousy scientist who chases bimbo students and dreams of the lucre to be had in patenting an "indispensable defence science". Venkman got his biggest laughs cutting deals with a shyster mayor and browbeating a busybody from environmental health: only in the 80s could such a reptile be a crowd-pleasing hero.
In the opinion of his friend Ramis, success didn't change Murray as much as it confused and darkened his outlook. Certainly he was cognisant that the work had to improve, and he used his proven value to take a firmer hand on the helm of his projects. Thus he made his commitment to Ghost Busters contingent upon Columbia's financing a film of Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, co-scripted by himself and director John Byrum. Previously filmed in 1946, Maugham's tale was of Larry Darrell, a well-bred Chicago boy who sups horrors in the Great War that dissuade him from the life of the dutiful bourgeois and encourage him on a quest for nothing less than enlightenment: fish-packing in Paris, coal-mining in Germany, meditating in Nepal. But it has always been considered gauche for millionaire movie stars to preach anti-materialist contentment, and Murray was courting a debacle. In the finished picture there was a surfeit of easy clowning and giddy romance, as if Murray was vulnerable without his bag of tricks, while the script spelled out an over-earnest message Maugham couldn't have endorsed. But Murray did manage to project the sense of a passive, thoughtful man soaking up life lessons. When Darrell erupts at his irredeemably snobby fiancée Isobel ("I've got a second chance, and I'm not gonna waste it on a big house, and a new car every year, and a bunch of friends who want a big house and a new car every year!"), Murray's startling vehemence indicated his acute sense of career disquiet.
Concrete overcoat
Of course the film didn't make a dime. As if serving proof of his sincerity, Murray promptly removed himself, his wife and their young son to Paris, where he enrolled at the Sorbonne to study history and philosophy. The couple's second son was born, and Murray was absent from movies for four years, barring an expert cameo as the gleeful masochist in the remake of Little Shop of Horrors (1986). For a while his intellectual curiosity was piqued by Ivan Reitman's project of a film treating the suicide of Mark Rothko, but like Ghost Busters the project slowly mutated into a cuddly Mike Ovitz package deal called Legal Eagles, and Murray walked away in exasperation. Nevertheless, he now seemed anxious to return to work, and sought the company of trusted collaborators. For Art Linson he essayed another of his egotistical monsters in Scrooged (1988). But as a bullying network-television executive, 80s venality incarnate, he was almost too convincing to merit his Dickensian redemption. Then he was dragged into Ghostbusters II (1989), disliking sequels in general and this title in particular. Early on, Sigourney Weaver, herself looking bemused to be back in make-up, warns Murray's Venkman not to put any of those "old cheap moves" on her. "No, no," he soothingly demurs, "I have all-new cheap moves." Neither actor looked convinced.
Just when his persona seemed to have become a concrete overcoat, Murray busted out in the early 90s. He started to allow his clowns to misfire: to fail, to fuck up a little. With his friend Howard Franklin he co-directed Quick Change (1990), and played Grimm, a smart man made misanthropic by the civic iniquities of New York City. He dons full clown costume and masterminds a bank heist to make good his flight to Fiji with girlfriend Geena Davis. But cleverness comes unstuck, Grimm's escape plan founders, and for once we watch Murray's charm fall flat in the face of a woman's scorn. He followed this trick by appearing in What About Bob? (1991) as an out-and-out klutz: a hopeless neurotic in the grip of multiple phobias who craves familial affection and decides to extract it from the wife and children of his appalling celebrity shrink (Richard Dreyfuss).
Then, an epiphany: the stupendous Groundhog Day (1993), a great leap forward for Murray and for director Ramis. Murray has graciously hailed Ramis' and Danny Rubin's script as the best he had seen; it toys with the Nietzschean notion of eternal return but ponders what kind of fresh hell it might be to awake each morning on the same freezing day in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Murray's thoroughly disagreeable television weatherman Phil Connors makes shabby efforts to exploit his curse, putting all-new cheap moves on his producer Rita (Andie MacDowell), hoping to fashion himself as her perfect man. Smartly rebuffed each time ("You'll never love anyone but yourself"), Phil finally blurts out what has been painfully apparent in Murray's performance: "I don't even like myself." The rejection drives Phil to a series of forlorn suicide bids (we even glimpse a blue-faced Murray on the mortuary slab). Before the picture descends wholly into existential darkness Phil finally appreciates that he's not a god and elects instead to be an angel, fashioning the "perfect day" out of an unbroken series of selfless acts. "Is there anything I can do for you today?" he murmurs upon finally finding himself back in time and cosily bedded with Rita. And there's the rub: such a redemption is all the sweeter for being visited on cinema's foremost incarnation of monstrous ego.
Cult item
Evidence that Murray may be becoming an authentic cult item is furnished in the fact that his most recent star vehicles appear to have mislaid his audience. Murray claims he no longer feels the need to draw blockbuster-sized droves, but one guesses he would have wished healthier receipts for Larger Than Life (1996), in which he escorts a mournfully lovable performing elephant across the US, and The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997), a goofy spy pastiche. Howard Franklin directed the former and extensively script-doctored the latter. Both are hugely amiable, and further exhibit Murray's new-found willingness to place his characters in the way of insult and injury. But it may be that the kids' tastes have moved on, or regressed. Murray seemed to acknowledge as much by showing out in the Farrelly Brothers' stupefyingly vulgar Kingpin (1996) as champion bowler Ernie McCracken: coward, chauvinist, born competitor, and the first thoroughgoing Murray monster we'd seen in a while.
A finer indication of where Murray might be heading is his polished turn as Frank 'The Moneystore' Milo in Mad Dog and Glory. ( Murray has a high regard for fellow Chicago boy John McNaughton, and together they are plotting a biopic of legendary White Sox owner Bill Veeck.) Impressively formidable in a succession of dark suits, hair slicked, tongue sharp, Murray is the epitome of a man programmed for macho bullshit yet truly desirous of masculine friendship. Owing his life to timid police photographer Robert De Niro and appreciative of the weaker man's wary regard, he makes him a gift of the hapless Uma Thurman and is appalled when De Niro falls for her. Murray projects a complex wounded ego as Frank is forced to issue threats ("You heard of botulism? We can get her with soup"), trade blows and finally retire hurt, if unmarked. By contrast, De Niro's struggle to project a simple man looks fussy.
Murray no longer wants to play the gang leader, the guy who's wise. He has acknowledged that his work in Rushmore was informed by the break-up of his first marriage: "You've had to have really suffered to realise how badly someone can feel, not just for an act or an incident, but a wave, a time period of bad feeling, of low self-esteem." In other words, he's older now, and more challenged by getting into the skin of men who are unfulfilled: straight-laced, self-contained, in sore need of unravelling. This is a rich comedic-dramatic seam for him to explore - and while we eagerly expect his Polonius, Murray's fans could have wished to see him trying out the public gravitas, gnawing guilt and slow-burning fury of Claudius. But no matter - we'll wait for his Lear. Who better to give a definitive reading of "the natural fool of fortune"? Laugh if you want, but on current form this must now be considered a likelier prospect than Murray showing up for Ghostbusters III. There again, given his growing appreciation of the interesting darkness on the fringes of the spotlight, he'd probably rather play Goneril.