In the fall of 1975, Saturday Night Live premiered on NBC and instantly worked like a fibrillator on moribund American comedy. The show had a crazed energy made up of equal parts countercultural rage and sophomoric high spirits: full of itself, gleefully mean-spirited, and dripping with irony. It was especially committed to the satiric overthrow of prevailing show-business conventions. That was the specialty of Bill Murray, who joined in the second season and shot to stardom with his caricatures of a third-rate lounge singer and an obsequious entertainment reporter, both of whom oozed insincere sincerity.
More than two decades later, Murray is playing, and playing brilliantly, the most insincerely sincere character in all of literature. He is Polonius in the latest film version of Hamlet, a movie so pretentious and labored that even though it runs only an hour and fifty minutes, it feels twice as long as Kenneth Branagh’s four hour version a few years ago. Writer-director Michael Almereyda’s conceit here is that Denmark is a multinational corporation in New York. Claudius is fighting a hostile takeover by Fortinbras, Gertrude is a drunken socialite, Hamlet makes artsy videos, Ophelia is an East Village photographer, and Hamlet’s father’s ghost seems to reside in a Pepsi vending machine.
Polonius is an exceedingly difficult character to play. He’s a sneak and a spy, and Hamlet takes him for a fool — but like most Shakespeare villains, he possesses a narrow and cynical wisdom. Murray finds a rare balance. Polonius plays the fool when he is around his betters. But at home, where he can display the weariness brought on by all the sucking-up he has to do, he offers generous and loving instruction to his children in what he takes to be bitter truths about the meaninglessness of love and generosity.
Murray’s triumph as Polonius is the latest unexpected development in a most unpredictable movie career. He was a star from the moment he appeared in his first leading role as an overage camp counselor in a Canadian throwaway film called Meatballs, effortlessly funny and touching in what became his patented role — the unambitious slob who grows. In the 1981 Stripes, he plays a cab-driving loser who joins the U.S. Army to get in shape and discovers that he is actually a leader (“This is America!” he exhorts his depressed fellow recruits. “We’re ten and one!”). In the 1982 Tootsie, he’s a waiter who writes depressing theater pieces about topics like Love Canal (“I want people to come up to me and say, ‘Hey, man, I saw your play. What was that?'”).
In the 1984 Ghostbusters, a mammoth hit, Murray is an out-and-out fraud — a psychic researcher at Columbia University who gets thrown off campus (“you never studied,” his disapproving colleague chides), opens a ghost-removal business, and saves New York from a Sumerian demon. In the 1988 Scrooged, he is a misanthropic network executive whose goal is to get everybody in America to watch television on Christmas Eve rather than spending the night with their families. He receives the Dickens treatment and realizes that a live broadcast of A Christmas Carol starring Buddy Hackett as Scrooge isn’t a good idea.
Wonderful as Murray’s shtick was, he began to grow stale by the time the 1990s rolled around, as did the other Saturday Night Live performers who jumped to the screen. It happened to Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, and Eddie Murphy (until a recent resuscitation) and would have happened to John Belushi if he had lived past 1982. Only Steve Martin made a successful transition into the 1990s, appearing as a harried father in several sentimental family comedies.
But then, in 1993, Murray starred in one of the best movies of the decade, Groundhog Day, a fairytale about a popinjay TV weatherman who finds himself reliving the same day over and over again until he learns humility, generosity, and love. Over the course of Groundhog Day, Murray must embody grandiosity, panic, rage, suicidal depression, despair, resigned acceptance, and joy — and does so with perfect pitch. It’s a performance that deserves to be mentioned alongside James Stewart’s in It’s a Wonderful Life. Like Stewart’s George Bailey, Murray’s Phil Connors is a man trapped against his will in a small town whose virtues are of no comfort to him. And like Stewart in the second half of his career, Murray has no peer when it comes to the difficult task of playing wrecked men.
That same year, he appeared in a misfire called Mad Dog and Glory as a Chicago mobster whose fondest wish is to be a standup comedian. He played a pre-operative transsexual living on the Hollywood fringe in the 1994 Ed Wood and last year essayed a has-been ventriloquist in Cradle Will Rock. And in 1998, he exuded frustrated misery in a superb and soulful comic turn as a millionaire industrialist whose only friend is a fifteen-year-old boy in Rushmore.
With the exception of Groundhog Day, these performances are all supporting roles. Murray began his career as a sketch comedian, and what matters in sketch comedy is not how big your part is, but how brightly you burn. He has brought that sensibility to his career, and has become what would have seemed unimaginable back when he was singing the “Theme from Star Wars” on Saturday Night Live — a great film actor.
John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and a columnist for the New York Post.
