Bill Murray is the only former Saturday Night Live star who still
knows how to choose a good movie. Whereas his co-stars and replacements
generally make the kinds of movies they would have ridiculed on the show,
Murray instead has developed a successful career as an indie-film actor.
His most recent film, The Life Aquatic with
Steve Zissou, now out on video and DVD, is a
comic gem that wonderfully showcases Murray’s deadpan charm. Steve
Zissou is a world-renowned oceanographer, very loosely inspired by Jacques
Cousteau, whose celebrity status stems from his own vanity documentaries.
The film charts Zissou’s obsessive drive, in Captain Ahab style, to
hunt down and kill the “jaguar shark” that ate his partner.
Life Aquatic is
Murray’s third collaboration with director Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums), and it
continues their unbroken string of great films. Anderson’s eccentric
style, which gives it the look and feel of a surrealistic European film, is
probably responsible for the lukewarm reaction. The awkward title probably
didn’t help, either. Zissou may be the wildest character of
Murray’s career, and fans are likely to be surprised at the turns
this character takes. You won’t find a better film from last year.
Murray’s big break came on two different TV
shows titled Saturday Night Live. The first was Howard Cosell’s failed variety show
in 1975 and the second, a few years later, the one that has long outlived
its welcome. His first starring role was in the juvenile summer-camp movie Meatballs (1979), which was
probably the real cause of Jason’s rampage. Murray rose above the
material, and this became the standard in his movies for the next decade.
His impression of Hunter S. Thompson in Where
the Buffalo Roam (1980) was pitch-perfect, but
the film lacked purpose. Even the blockbuster Ghostbusters (1984) suffers from a grandiose production that
drowns everything but Murray’s priceless one-liners.
The tide shifted with the bank-heist comedy Quick Change (1990), which
gave Murray his first fully developed script. Could that be why it bombed? What About Bob? (1991)
successfully exploited the neuroses in Murray’s persona, and it is
one of his funniest films. 1993 was a year of triumph for Murray, featuring
two of his best films. Groundhog Day, the story of a TV weatherman forced to relive the same
day over and over, contains one of the most brilliantly intricate scripts
ever written. Mad Dog and Glory gave Murray a great supporting role as a mobster who gives
a woman (Uma Thurman) as a gift to a cop (Robert De Niro). Murray’s
character was actually menacing without losing a drop of his comic persona.
His best-known triumph is the indie hit Lost
in Translation (2003), for which he garnered
his first Oscar nomination. It topped many lists but disappointed filmgoers
who expected too much.
Next up for Murray are Broken
Flowers and The
Lost City.
This article appears in May 26 – Jun 1, 2005.
