Frank Oz and Steve Martin's Inspired Show Business Comedy Bowfinger Offers a Potent Double Dose of Eddie Murphy at his Very Best
After keeping a low profile throughout the teens, Eddie Murphy scored a terrific comeback role in Dolemite is My Name, a biopic of beloved cult “party record” pioneer and unlikely blaxploitation icon Rudy Ray Moore, who starred in a string of sublimely homemade action comedy extravaganzas in the wild and wooly 1970s with titles like Dolemite, The Human Tornado, Petey Wheatstraw, The Devil’s Son-in-Law and his anti-PCP disco message movie The Avenging Disco Godfather, which killed the Hip Hop icon’s film career in the most insane, entertaining fashion imaginable.
Rudy Ray Moore’s misadventures in the Chitlin' circuit and then in the most perversely DIY corners of the blaxploitation revolution of the 1970s begged for the big screen treatment and while it would have been nice if this prototypically black story were told by black filmmakers, the biopic nevertheless had a strong creative team in director Craig Brewer, who lent a lurid, funky, b-movie sensuality to his breakout film Hustle & Flow, as well as Black Snake Moan and even a surprisingly distinctive remake of Footloose that quietly improved on the iconic yet terrible original and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who’ve previously written such beloved biopics as Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Man on the Moon as well as the well-received American Crime Story miniseries about the O. J. Simpson murder trial.
Unlike the dashingly handsome and wildly charismatic Murphy, who was born a movie star, Moore was an unlikely action hero and film icon. The pudgy comedian turned movie star looked goofy, more like a comic relief sidekick than a leading man. Moore talked funny, in a hypnotically stilted, rhythmic, sometimes rhyming cadence that served as a link between the X-rated rants of his party albums and the gathering storm that would become hip hop. As an unlikely thespian, Moore was fascinatingly, hypnotically terrible, but his mesmerizing brand of bad acting has proven infinitely more entertaining and memorable than the legitimately good acting of just about anyone else.
Murphy’s role as Moore echoed two of Murphy’s best-loved performances of the past twenty years, although considering the nature of Murphy’s movies from that period (A Thousand Words, Imagine That, Meet Dave, Norbit, Shrek the Third, The Haunted Mansion, I Spy, Daddy Day Care, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, Showtime, Holy Man and Dr. Doolittle 2), that’s not saying much.
Dolemite is My Name follows in the footsteps of Dreamgirls, which nearly won Murphy an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, in casting the Saturday Night Live alum as an explosively charismatic, magnetic entertainer who spends much of his career performing for overwhelmingly black audiences in historically black cultural spaces like the Chitlin’ circuit and the black independent boom of the 1970s, for which Moore served as something of a clown prince.
The story of a stubborn, peculiarly brilliant funnyman deciding to make his own homemade version of zeitgeist-capturing milestones in the cinema of cool like Shaft and Superfly with little in the way of money and resources and even less in the way of talent and technical know-how also calls to mind Murphy’s acclaimed dual performance in the 1999 cult hit Bowfinger.
Frank Oz’s Steve Martin-written and Brian Grazer-produced show business comedy casts an uncharacteristically engaged Murphy in the challenging and rewarding dual roles of Kit Ramsay, a paranoid, narcissistic movie superstar not unlike Murphy himself, and his lookalike brother Jiffrenson "Jiff" Ramsey, an adorable geek who just wants to run errands for nice people yet ends up becoming an accidental movie star when Robert “Bobby” Bowfinger (Steve Martin), an Ed Wood-like dreamer and abysmal filmmaker, ropes him into a wildly unethical scheme to trick and manipulate Kit into starring in a surreally terrible science fiction movie called Chubby Rain without his knowledge or consent.
Ed Wood famously dramatized the surreal moment in trash movie history when the eternally enterprising, shameless filmmaker (the two go hand in hand) used random footage of his friend and sometimes collaborator Bela Lugosi and a body double to create the illusion that Lugosi was “starring” in Plan 9 From Outer Space despite the actor being, you know, dead, and consequently unable to object to being in what was once a popular favorite for worst movie of all time.
Bowfinger imagines an Ed Wood-level trash auteur making an entire film through such fraudulent means by having his gleefully incompetent crew, partially composed of illegal immigrants captured at the border, ambush the already paranoid Kit in various locations without revealing that they’re actors or crew-people, so that they can capture his spontaneous, unscripted and very real reaction to being continually confronted by bizarre strangers yammering about an alien invasion. The idea is to combine the footage of Kit with scenes filmed without him into a feature film that will make them all rich and famous.
The catalyst for all of this elaborate deception is a screenplay for a movie about aliens coming down to Earth inside rain drops (hence the title Chubby Rain) that Bowfinger sees as his ticket to the big time even if, by all indications, it may just be the blueprint for the worst motion picture ever made.
Pumped full of delusional self-belief, Bowfinger assembles a cast and crew of dreamers, losers and undocumented immigrant workers who share a ferocious desire to break into the exciting, high stakes world of Hollywood moviemaking combined with an egregious lack of talent and experience.
For his leading lady, Bowfinger ends up with Daisy (Heather Graham), who comes to Hollywood a dowdily dressed, doe-eyed innocent and immediately transforms into a ruthless striver eager to use her body and ripe sexuality to get ahead.
For all of its likability, Bowfinger is a profoundly soft show-business comedy full of lazy cliches and stock archetypes, none more flimsy or exhausted than the conniving actress willing to sleep with the sum of show-business to become a star. Daisy is the cinematic equivalent of the hoary old movie joke about the blonde actress so dumb and naive that she tries to get ahead by sleeping with a screenwriter.
Daisy does, in fact, sleep with Chubby Rain’s doughy dreamer of a first-time screenwriter but she also sleeps with Bowfinger and just about everybody else involved with the production. Graham throws herself into the role the same way her character flings herself at men she thinks can help her career. That doesn’t make her anything less of a sexist caricature, particularly when Daisy’s strategic promiscuity climaxes with the closing revelation that after making her way through the men of Chubby Rain, she ends up with a woman whom we are told is the one of the most powerful lesbians in Hollywood.
The film’s riffing on Scientology in the form of Mind Head, a celebrity-obsessed cult that counts Kit among its members, is even more toothless, never rising to the level of satire. The same is true of Bowfinger as a whole. It’s less interested in sticking it to Hollywood than in eking big, goofy laughs out of the outsized desperation of lovable losers who will do anything for their shot at the big time and the unraveling of a neurotic superstar inclined to see conspiracies and enemies everywhere even under the best of circumstances.
Along with much else, Bowfinger shares with Ed Wood an infectious, underdog “Let’s put on a show” affability. Jiff doesn’t show up until deep into the proceedings but his unabashed, adorable geekiness dominates the rest of the film. He’s a geek to be sure, with a mouth full of braces, the slouching posture of a Scoliosis-riddled old woman and a perverse hunger to do minor errands for people, but he’s so lovable, enthusiastic and child-like in his sunny innocence that he transcends hoary stereotype. To put things in the terms of Murphy’s other hit movies, he’s more an endearing, multi-dimensional Professor Sherman Klump than a one-note, pathetic Norbit.
Murphy is less likable but just as funny as Kit as he falls apart and sees the bizarre confrontations he’s having with Bowfinger’s crew as conclusive proof that his fears about an alien invasion are justified. Kit struggles to hold it all together and find the inner strength to refrain from his powerful urge to expose himself to the Los Angeles Lakers’ cheerleading squad.
With Bowfinger, Martin wrote one of Murphy’s best roles since his 1980s-era prime. Like My Name is Dolemite, Oz’s beloved cult favorite is a winning, eminently quotable reminder of what Murphy is capable of when he has the right material and, you know, actually tries.
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