The 2012 Flop A Thousand Words Made Eddie Murphy's Long Break From Movies Eminently Understandable
The buzz for Dolemite Is My Name Craig Brewer’s wildly entertaining new biopic about blaxploitation cult hero and godfather of Hip Hop Rudy Ray Moore and the too-strange-for-fiction making of his breakthrough debut Dolemite is that Eddie Murphy is back, baby!
The comedy superstar’s usual modus operandi is to choose the worst, most hack script available then lazily sleepwalk his way through high-concept, big-budget nonsense that egregiously waste everyone’s time—critics, audiences, the cast, the crew and the perpetually under-achieving Murphy himself—and is either immediately forgotten or remembered with a frightful shudder, like The Adventures of Pluto Nash, Norbit, Meet Dave and Imagine That.
We don’t expect Murphy to be emotionally invested in the films he makes. We don’t even expect him to pretend to care. We expect him to broadcast his contempt for the material he’s in at every turn, to let us know that he’s no more enthused about The Adventures of Pluto Nash than you are but if you just follow his lead and tune the fuck out then the whole sorry ordeal will be over before you know it.
Now THIS a humorous facial expression!
That’s why it’s jarring, in a good way, to see Murphy in movies where he actually seems to care about the quality of his performance and the overall product. Murphy consequently got way too much credit just for trying and not phoning it in with character actor turns in Bowfinger, Dreamgirls and Dolemite Is My Name.
Murphy gets props just for minimal effort because we have come to expect that his vehicles will be lazy insults to the public’s intelligence like the dire, wannabe profound metaphysical comedy A Thousand Words, which was filmed in 2008 but only saw release in 2012.
Even by late-period Murphy standards, A Thousand Words received a dreadful reception. Critics didn’t need a thousand words to eviscerate its violently lurching tones, maudlin sentimentality and abysmal physical comedy, only two for a pithy, Jay Sherman-like judgment of “It stinks!”
A Thousand Words scored the notorious Zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes, meaning that not a single critic recognized by the site gave it a positive review. NOBODY liked it. Not a single goddamn soul. It didn’t fare much better at the box-office, grossing a little over half its relatively modest forty million dollar budget.
Murphy’s long-delayed stinkeroo had such a toxic response that in Great Britain the movie went direct-to-video. A Thousand Words had already failed in every conceivable way, and the people behind it were undoubtedly just eager to cut their losses.
What’s dispiriting about A Thousand Words isn’t just that it is staggeringly awful but that there’s no way it could have been anything but terrible. Murphy may be among our most charismatic entertainers but when a comedy/drama is as DOA as A Thousand Words is it requires the services not of a dynamic leading man but those of a necromancer.
A Thousand Words reeks of unintentional self-parody. It’s the real-life, non-ironic, non-satirical version of the surreally idiotic, high-concept comedies for simpletons that were the source of Adam Sandler’s self-loathing Funny People superstar’s self-hatred as well as his immense personal fortune.
It’s as if Murphy pissed off the wrong witch with an offensive joke during the Raw/Delirious days and she cursed him to make dreadful metaphysical comedies in which work-obsessed dads learn what’s really important though some manner of supernatural contrivance until the end end of time. Even after Murphy dies he’ll still be forced to make these movies, family-friendly romps with titles like Grandpa Is a Sassy Talking Pumpkin.
With the exception of the solid if less than transcendent Tower Heist the movies Murphy made post-Dreamgirls were so abysmal—Norbit, Shrek the Third, A Thousand Words, Imagine That and Mr. Church—that when Murphy quietly stepped away from acting in films for a few years not only did people not object, but they didn’t even seem to notice.
Murphy has made some wonderful films but by the time he alternately sleepwalked and flailed his way through A Thousand Words he had gotten very bad at making movies, to the point where maybe he shouldn’t be allowed to do it anymore.
Who could possibly object to Murphy taking a few years off to count and appreciate his money rather than subjecting the world to more Meet Daves?
A Thousand Words typecasts Murphy as Jack McCall, a high-flying, motormouth literary agent blessed with the gift of gab and an enviable existence, complete with scorchingly hot wife Caroline (Kerry Washington), a showcase home that looks like it cost millions, an adorable baby and an obscenely lucrative job.
But he’s the kind of ethically lax wheeler dealer who feigns a wife in labor to cut ahead in line at Starbucks and is exclusively devoted to his job rather than his family. In other words, he is a man in need of the kinds of life lessons that can only be imparted in movies like these via magical nonsense, in this case a magical Bodhi Tree that appears mysteriously in his back yard one day and that is inextricably, if inexplicably, connected to his own health and mortality.
The thousand leaves on the Bodhi Tree correspond to the thousand words he will be able to utter before he dies. We learn this from Dr. Sinja, a Deepak Chopra-like superstar spiritual guru that Australian Cliff Curtis plays completely straight, as a genuine, sincere spiritual leader with an authentic connection to the spirit world and an understanding of the true nature of existence that surpasses those of other mere mortals.
How fucking toothless is A Thousand Words? It can’t bring itself to make a single goddamn joke at the expense of a Deepak Chopra figure out of a wishy-washy concern that making fun of a prophet-for-profit might possibly offend someone, somewhere, conceivably. That’s like a comedy in the 1980s prominently featuring a Jim Bakker-like televangelist positing him as a sincere man of faith and not a greed-driven charlatan.
For reasons the film never deigns to explain, what happens to the Bodhi tree happens to Jack. If its leaves die, he ostensibly dies. If squirrels run all over the tree, then it is as if they ran all over Jack’s body, their razor-sharp claws undoubtedly shredding his delicate genitalia. When gardeners spray the tree with DDT it gets Jack stoned out of his gourd during a business meeting in a cringe-inducing set-piece scored, inevitably, to Afroman’s “Because I Got High.”
There have been many, many dreadful sequences where squares accidentally get high but as far as I am aware, A Thousand Words is the only film where that hoary gag is facilitated through a magical, metaphysical connection between a shitty human being and a supernatural tree that allows the man to get blazed out of his physical/metaphysical/spiritual bond to a hunk of wood and leaves.
A Thousand Words takes a lurch towards the heavy and maudlin when Jack visits his Dementia-stricken mother Annie (the great Ruby Dee) who thinks that her workaholic son is her late husband, who abandoned his family before dying a lonely, unmourned death. Because Dee is a great actress and a majestic, regal presence this scene has a gravity shockingly out of place in a wacky physical romp that suggests Charades: The Movie for much of its first two acts.
That bracing swerve towards the somber makes more sense in the context of the film’s third act, when it decides that, actually, it’s a weighty drama about a man staring down death and coming to terms with the failings and inadequacies that plagued his wildly successful but spiritually empty existence in preparation for the end of all things.
That might work if the hour leading up to A Thousand Words deciding it was a melodrama about the weightiest issues known to mankind weren’t filled with puerile nonsense, godawful mugging and flailing and Clark Duke filling the massive cosmic void filled by an explosively verbal performer like Eddie Murphy not being able to talk with improvisation and ad-libbing that would hit the cutting room floor in any other film.
When Jack is unable to talk out of a need to conserve his limited words the people in his life take this silence as a cue to lash out in anger at him for no reason or get so nervous they stumblingly confess to all manner of transgressions, like when Duke’s assistant sidekick admits that he kissed his boss’ wife at the office Christmas party then had enthusiastic furry sex with a co-worker all over the office, including his boss’ desk.
In an even more tone-deaf riff, when Jack can’t talk, his assistant takes up the slack during a business meeting where he tries to impress his lunch mates with his clumsy approximation of 1980s black black, peppering his lingo with dated admonishments to “chill out, homey” because they’ve reached the “show me your dick time” stage of negotiations.
A Thousand Words is not a complete waste. The late John Witherspoon absolutely destroys in a cameo as a blind old man Jack tries to help through traffic; Witherspoon gleans more humor out of one minute of physical comedy than Murphy does out of scene after scene where he works up a furious flop sweat in a desperate attempt to be funny in a context that does not make that possible.
At its most exquisitely inane and convoluted, A Thousand Words has Jack compensate for his inability to talk during a conference call with clients by having a series of talking dolls communicate on his behalf, including Austin Powers (who enthuses “Yeah, baby!”), The Terminator, Tony the Tiger (who thinks the terms of the proposed deal are nothing short of gr-reat) and finally, and most nonsensically, a pimp doll that says “Shut up before I pimp-slap your behind”, a phrase I’m sure is ubiquitous in business meetings.
In this sequence, and this sequence only, A Thousand Words embraces giddy, delirious self-parody and becomes so bad it’s good. Otherwise the film is so bad it’s unwatchable.
For a high-concept, wacky physical comedy about a mysterious magical guru and a tree of wonder, A Thousand Words is an unbecomingly grim and morbid exploration of mortality, parental abandonment and Dementia. And, for an unbecomingly grim and morbid exploration of mortality, parental abandonment and Dementia, this is shamelessly, unforgivably wacky and broad yet bland.
I’d like to think Murphy learned the right lessons from A Thousand Words. In a filmography overflowing with embarrassments and nadirs, it still stands out for being particularly misguided and confused, a comedy-drama that neatly segregates its dramatic and comedic elements so that it’s always either a brutally unfunny, zany would-be laugh riot or an inexplicably dour look at the inevitability of death.
Murphy’s many bombs generally don’t flop because they try to do something ambitious and worthwhile and come up short. Instead, they fail because they aspire to do the bare minimum to qualify as a movie and still fall short due not to an excess of vision or audacity but rather a dearth of either quality.
When Murphy invests himself in a project like Dolemite Is My Name it’s obvious but when he’s completely checked out, as in the case of A Thousand Words, it is even more glaringly apparent.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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