Bill Murray’s indie film career resurgence over the past decade, through which the sometime “funny man” has taken melancholic serio-comic roles in films like Rushmore, Lost in Translation and Broken Flowers, has been animated by a kind of communal, revisionist nostalgia. Filmmakers like Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola were teenagers during Murray’s first brush with fame in the early 80s, which would have made them extremely susceptible to the prototypical Murray character of the day, which hit its zenith with Ghostbusters.
Like Dr. Peter Venkman, many Murray characters seemed capable of doing anything, but usually chose to do nothing, and even when forced into action, they’d remain detached from the task at hand behind permanently rolled eyes. As Venkman was saving New York City from the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper and a possessed Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, he did it with whilst mumbling one-liners around the cigarette hanging out of his mouth, without any obvious attachment to the world around him. Not only was he essentially an existential hero––he was a slacker academic. To smart kids who wanted to grow up to Do Things or Make Things without losing their cool, without ever having to look like they cared, this was irresistible, and it’s this element of the Murray persona that’s been extracted in order to spawn the persona of later films, Bill Murray in Mid-life.
Most Bill Murray in Mid-Life characters feel like real(er) world versions of what might happen to such a guy in middle age, after twenty or thirty years of smirking through tight spots and refusing to confront the weight of any particular situation, when they finally come face to face with their own mortality. Inevitably, BMiML makes an attempt to align himself with youth. Lost in Translation might be primarily a daddy fantasy, but it also approaches a conversation about what happens when the daddy in question transfers his attention away from his family and places it on a symbol of his lost youth.
If that theory holds water––and assuming all theories about the characters that an actor plays can be seamlessly transposed to apply to the actor’s actual life––than the fact that Murray is now being divorced by his wife of a decade on the grounds of “adultery, addiction to marijuana and alcohol, abusive behavior, physical abuse, sexual addictions and frequent abandonment,” basically makes perfect sense. With the exception of the physical abuse (which is so inherently not funny that it’s not really possible to justify it within a single, speciously reasoned blog post), this seems like the stuff of a Lost in Translation sequel, the story of what happened after he left Tokyo and went home to face his family and found himself incapable of taking responsibility for the transference of affection.
Or maybe not. But if the New Bill Murray has been based, at least in part, on a couple of auteurs’ childish fantasies of unburdened adulthood, it’ll be interesting to see what the inevitable scandal surrounding Murray’s real-life divorce does to that fantasy. Oh, also: Murray’s next film is the apparently fully wholesome family pic City of Ember, due out in fall.
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