Amy's Robot

There's only so much Bill Murray to go around

American independent filmmakers: we know how deep and abiding your love is for Bill Murray. Sofia, Wes, Jim, we understand that you each wrote your most recent leading male characters specifically for Bill Murray, and that no other actor could have brought such woebegone wistfulness to your movies. Or deliver the perfect deadpan line in the saddest and loneliest scenes in a way that makes audiences laugh and feel empathic and intelligent. As Cinema Blend writes about his role in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, "He's not just careworn, he's terminally lonely. There's something pretty compelling about that."

Jarmusch must have been over the moon when he saw what Bill Murray was bringing to movies like Lost in Translation and The Royal Tenenbaums. Earlier Jarmusch movies that featured John Lurie in the role of the sad-eyed loner drifting through life were melancholy and weirdly warm at the same time. But Jarmusch's expressive yet detached main characters were just waiting for Bill Murray to come along. Jarmusch cast Bill Murray in one segment of his collection of short movies Coffee and Cigarettes, and his love for him was so immediate and great that it led to an attempt by RZA and Jarmusch to get everyone in the world to call each other "Bill Murray."

And without the comic genius of Bill Murray, Broken Flowers wouldn't amount to much. A man looking over Mapquest directions in a rental car with a resigned and melancholy expression = yawn. Bill Murray doing it = funny and emotionally resonant. The structure of the movie is the typical episodic structure of most Jarmusch movies, as Bill Murray travels around the country visiting former lovers with whom he has lost all contact. He achieves less and less of a connection with them in each successive encounter, and by the end arrives at some kind of Zen-like reconciliation with the past. Not particularly profound, but with Bill Murray on the screen for almost every moment of the movie, it all somehow adds up to more than the sum of its parts, much like the net effect of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Yes, the early years of our new century are looking like the Golden Age of Bill Murray. Young American filmmakers would be lost without him. But there's a finite supply of Bill Murray out there, and now even Andy Garcia has gotten his claws into him. Let's hope he keeps giving his time to good filmmakers, and doesn't get any lucrative offers for Garfield 2.

categories: Celebrities, Movies
posted by amy at 9:58 AM | #