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WARNING: Contains Lost In Translation spoilers!
By now, there are so many ex-Saturday Night Live stars (whether "ex" because they've graduated from the show, or been shitcanned) that, once an actor leaves the show, he has a pretty clear idea of what he'll probably do next. He can become a huge movie star, headlining his own megabudget comedies, as Adam Sandler has done. He can star in a succession of medium-sized generic "comedies," in the manner of Rob Schneider. He can reinvent himself as a dramatic character actor, and thus follow in Dan Aykroyd's footsteps. (Countless SNL alumni have, of course, found themselves on a fourth path, leading to career oblivion.)
When Bill Murray left SNL in 1980, there was only a handful of ex-SNL stars whose example he could have followed (and judging by his comments in Live From New York, Murray wasn't interested in following Chevy Chase's example in any way, their collaboration on Caddyshack notwithstanding). But Murray's post-SNL career had a solid start. He cemented his fame level in the ensembles of successful comedies like Meatballs, Stripes, and Tootsie. He then raised his already respectable fame level by headlining the enormous hits Ghostbusters and its sequel, which brought him enough clout that he could move on to a mix of high-concept comedies with broad appeal (Scrooged, What About Bob?, Groundhog Day, quirky cult favourites (Quick Change, Mad Dog and Glory, Ed Wood), and the odd utterly unwatchable misfire (Larger Than Life, The Man Who Knew Too Little). Murray showed up on screen often enough for us to know he was still working -- making movies that, more often than not, we wanted to see -- but wasn't so relentlessly overexposed either professionally (like Robin Williams) or personally (like tabloid darling Eddie Murphy) that we didn't get all sick of his ass. Even if we didn't love every single thing he did, we were glad he was around -- which is about as famous as a comic actor can hope to be. Then came Rushmore.
We hope Murray sends Wes Anderson a very large and lavish fruit basket every Christmas. Anderson cast Murray as Herman Blume in the contemporary classic Rushmore, and Murray should be very grateful that he did; before Rushmore, Murray's stabs at drama -- playing Hunter S. Thompson in Where The Buffalo Roam, or Larry Darrell in The Razor's Edge -- were little more than novelty acts. Rushmore legitimized Murray as something more substantial than an SNL refugee. Herman Blume is one of our favourite pathetic comic figures in all of film, and requires Murray to put his formidable but theretofore untested acting gifts to work not only to create this somewhat unpleasant character, but ensure that we are, straight out of the gate, totally on his side. Herman starts out as an average dickhead -- and, more to the point, pretty much the opposite of Max Fischer, the other weirdo co-screenwriters Anderson and Owen Wilson have just spent fifteen minutes making us love. Herman and Max are drawn to each other despite their differences, just as they are drawn to the same woman -- a calamity that complicates their friendship even as their agreement that she is special sort of confirms the best each thinks of the other. In other words, if they can both appreciate Miss Cross's subtle charms, they probably have all the other important things in common, too. Anyway, Herman doesn't have his shit together. He's alienated from his frosty wife; flummoxed by his obnoxious twin sons; wealthy and successful in his career -- a self-made man, in fact -- but unfulfilled and sad until Max worms his way into Herman's life. Herman is a study of midlife helplessness; the more he loses his moorings, the funnier he is: hauling ass across a playground away from Miss Cross; smoking two cigarettes at once in a hospital elevator; running over Max's bike with his car. Murray's was a name that had come to be synonymous with "deadpan," but he hadn't ever put his deadpan to use to portray both humour and pathos -- not until Rushmore.
Murray is now getting some of the best reviews of his career for his role in Sofia Coppola's character study, Lost In Translation. The same characteristics put to instructive purposes in the fable that is Rushmore -- disconnection, ennui, yet a sincere wish to do better and lead a meaningful life -- are put to more naturalistic dramatic use in Translation. Murray's Bob -- an action star in the twilight of his career -- finds himself a stranger in a foreign country, but sleepwalks through his disorientation as a matter of course, giving the impression that he isn't much more comfortable or engaged in his life even back "home" in the U.S., where he speaks the language. Bob strikes up a friendship with fellow jet-lag sufferer Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a grave young woman killing time in the hotel while her photographer husband works. The transitory nature of travel helps to accelerate the speed of Charlotte and Bob's friendship, and in less than a week, they are more intimate with each other (though still chaste) than either one of them is with his or her spouse. While Johansson is very good, and Charlotte has a lot of business about figuring out what kind of person she wants to be for the rest of her life, it's really Murray's film; Bob's struggle to determine the course of his life -- in which, we sense, he'd been drifting up to the point when he arrives in Tokyo at the beginning of the film -- is no less important just because he has thirty years on Charlotte. Furthermore, because of his age and situation in life, it falls to Bob, in a way, to determine the course of his relationship with Charlotte and behave with the greater chastity and rectitude. It's a credit to Coppola's script and direction, and to Murray's performance, that the precise nature of Bob and Charlotte's friendship is left ambiguous, but that the fact that they have had a positive effect on each other is clear.
Which brings us to our main point: Bill Murray is funny. He's very funny. Murray's signature comic role -- in which he starts out as the one character smart enough to recognize the absurdity around him, and responds with a dry, deadpan mien, only to get more and more agitated and ultimately explode into a geyser of rage and/or hysteria -- fits only Murray himself and, back in the day, Steve Martin. But something kind of funny happened on the way to the land of the elder comic statesmen: Martin decided to keep remaking his remake of Father of the Bride, and Murray decided to go a different way and do the best work of his career, instead. Those of you who missed Rushmore and Translation and remember Murray best as Lisa Loopner's boyfriend Todd may find it difficult to fathom that Murray's comic work should, in his fifty-fourth year, be taken just as seriously as a dramatic actor as he ever was as a comic. But he really is that good, and he deserves to achieve fame enough that everybody knows it.
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