Bowfinger
dir. Frank Oz
Universal

Many have dissed Bowfinger for not being “as funny as it could have been,” by which they mean that it’s not a non-stop hilarity machine like There’s Something About Mary. Indeed, this movie’s sweet sprit may confound the irony-fed masses, but this is hardly a liability.

Bowfinger actually reminded me of nothing so much as The (original) Muppet Movie, with its lovable losers caravaning to each successive misadventure and coming to care about one another more along the way. (The similarity is no doubt there in part because director Frank Oz was the original voice of Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear and himself directed The Muppets Take Manhattan.) It’s an odd pedigree, to be sure, but Bowfinger is a worthy heir.

Steve Martin, a gifted playwright and author of this script, plays Bobby Bowfinger, a director (of films like The Yugo Story) who sees his long-in-coming break with a script he commissioned called Chubby Rain. When he can’t get action superstar Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy) to join the production, he decides to shoot the movie around him — to just have the actors go up to Kit and deliver their lines.

It’s a sly, successful premise, greatly enabled by Kit’s paranoia, which is being “treated” by the Scientologish organization Mind Head. A less skillfully handled comedy would strain under some of the coincidences (Chubby Rain’s a sci-fi movie, and Kit’s afraid of aliens), but Martin’s script is tight and Oz’s direction is deft, tying the silly situational comedy to the satire and the sight gags for a surprisingly coherent product. Even Murphy’s double role (as Kit stand-in Jiff), a conceit of his that has always seemed more showy than inspired, is spot-on here.

Heather Graham continues to surprise, here as a farm girl with the seductiveness to achieve her ingenue ambitions — “from Ohio but not from Ohio,” as she puts it — and Catherine Baranski brings her reliable, sly comedy to bear. The cast is rounded out with actors such as Jamie Kennedy and the very well-cast Robery Downey, Jr. and Terence Stamp. There’s not an off-note to be found.

Those who need their comedies on amphetamines probably won’t get their fix here, but there hasn’t been a film with this sustained tone of abandon in a long time. (The Impostors was so abandoned it finally seemed forced.) Undoubtedly, not every joke in Bowfinger works, and when one collapses you notice it. If you have affection for comedies besides those that rely on taboo-rattling shocks and telegraphed sarcasm, however, this movie’s practiced hysteria and glee are sweet rewards.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)