Big Mouth Finds the Meaning of Life

Midterm Examination Film Genres: Comedy and Drama Part I, Identifications. For each film, identify the actor, his facial expression, and identify the line as comedy or drama.

"Listen, lady, I don't think I have to take this kind of abuse, and I know I don't need to take you and your luggage to the airport."

"I've been slimed." (Scene; battle in Europe, dead friend laying in mud.) "The guy was a slob. Ever see him eat? Starving children could fill their bellies on the food he left on his beard."

ANSWERS: actor, Bill Murray; facial expression, plastered; the films, Stripes, Ghostbusters. Drama? Comedy? Pick either; if Razor's Edge tells us anything, it's not to indulge in such theoretical musings; were a reincarnated William Shakespeare to cast Murray as King Lear, no doubt every wimp's favorite drillmaster could deadpan even the death scene.

So what? Somerset Maugham himself thought the original film version of his novel Razor's Edge could run as a comedy, but Murray and Director John Byrum exude the fetish for self-seriousness of a philosophy student and the free-floating silliness of a circus clown.

Seemingly trying to retain the comedy of the Meaning of Life while substituting real meaning for satire, Razor's Edge instead becomes a kind of home movie version of Murray's journeys around the world with outtakes from failed soap opera pilots. to distinguish the comic absurd from the would-be serious drama, director John Byrum uses Jack Netzshe's heavy-handed music and a seemingly endless stock of orange sunsets to highlight the shifts to real drama that his direction and Murray's acting leave otherwise undistinguished.

We never meet Larry (Bill Murray) Darrell's mother, but imagine she could tell the story. "I don't no what went wrong," we would here her say. "We sent Larry to a good college, we used to pick out good conservative clothes for him, and then World War I came. He wanted to run ambulances somewhere over in Europe with a friend of his. I figured at least he'd get some culture, but you don't stay at five star hotels and, well. His friend died over there and that may have been part of it, but he just kept saving he wanted to think. Then what his fiancee said convinced me he had flipped, "I'm not going back. I'm not going to be a stockbroker."

Let Sophie (Theresa Russell), the girlfriend he leaves behind, tell the rest. "I went to see him in Paris. He was working wrapping fish all day and said, he was reading a lot. I asked him to come back with me, and do you know what he said?"

"I have one chance at life," he says, staring around a Paris watering hole, "and I'm not going to waste it on a big house and a new car every year and a bunch of friends who want a big house and a new ear every year."

Larry Darrell wants to find the Meaning of Life in some sort of mix of intensive reading and travel. The more Murray talks of reading and contemplation, though, the more it seems the film tries to yank our contact lenses of understanding out of out eyes, making the search for meaning little more than a vague blur. "Do you read all these books," asks a miner, pointing to a filled shelf. "I skim them," Time and again the books stay blurred; the brown blur could be a first edition Kant, the redder blur could be Bible, but they could just as well be part of the Reader's Digest set of Condensed Books. Imagine Sylvester Stallone re-making Rocky by leaving out all the fight seenes; John Byrum evidently has.

"You won't find the answers in a book," a miner tells Darrell, as we must already have assumed. "You'll have to go there." There means India, the answers, once again, mean nothing. Filmed on location, the Indian seenes could just as effectively have superimposed Murray onto a set of postcards. If a Salada tea bag were a person, it just might be the mystic on top of the Indian mountain. "The path to salvation," the mystic intones in Dan Rather style Mid-westernese, "is narrow and as difficult to walk as razor's edge."

For that we have to go to India? His face still unchanged, but his body now wrapped in a robe, you can imagine Murray deadpanning. "I went to the East in search of meaning, and all I got was this robe." In return for watching Murray stare catatonically into space at various spots on the introspection circuit, we can feel only like we've intruded on some sort of home movie: lots of pretty pictures, clear evidence the trip indeed took place, our host conspicuously juxtaposed against exotic environments.

Even as a home movie, Razor's Edge lacks the Wears Traveller in the back telling us just what everything means. Despair not, Ever thoughtful Columbia pictures offers film critics a publicity pack complete with Murray and Director Byrum's musings that role well enough Characters, who seem only straight men a women for Murray take on complex even literary dimmensions. "Catherine's character (Isabel) is someone you fall in love with who returns that love but to the extent that it makes you feel miserable," Get it? Seeing the film won't help. Murray might as well have said, "Yes, and there where you see the poor peasants walking along the river is where we got this great but on an oriental rug."

Smothered by Murray's miserable performance. Murray's co-stars, evidently unaware of their tangential relationship to the film, deliver strong performances. Denholm Elliot plays Uncle Elliot, the quintessential Maugham man of society with impeccable charm and studied superficiality. "I spent my life with the great names of Europe," he says with the perfect match of weariness and savoir-faire, "and who comes to visit me." Less successfully, Catherine Hicks portrays Isabel with the pain and confusion one associates with "the drugs and all of that" that are the sum of our knowledge of Isabel.

It is only appropriate that Murray has endeavored upon his first "dramatic performance" the same year that Bozo the Clown is running for President. Both reside in the comic file of our memory, and Murray's blank face and Bozo's five-hour make-up job make us think we will get a few laughs. We get a few. His girlfriend demanding they talk, Murray jumps up on to the pool deck, wags himself about, saying. "Let's talk; let's talk seal talk." Bozo says he's as serious as a heart attack, and at some point you get the feeling he is as serious as a heart attack and it becomes almost as painful to watch. Bozo as President and Murray as a dramatic actor: the concepts sound funny, but the performances, though laughable, just don't work.