During his interview with Marc Maron on the invaluable WTF podcast, Judd Apatow said he based the character of a wildly successful yet deeply depressed misanthrope in Funny People less on Adam Sandler, the actor who played him, than on Rodney Dangerfield. Sandler is by all accounts a well-adjusted, happy individual who has found a balance between riskier projects designed to satisfy his creative muse (Punch-Drunk Love, Spanglish, Reign Over Me, Funny People) and the kind of pandering horseshit the public actually wants to see, like Grown Ups.
For his funnyman who has gained the world but lost his soul, Apatow tried to envision a comedy superstar who never got to make a Punch-Drunk Love or Funny People but was reduced to prostituting his gifts for giant paychecks. One of the film’s sharpest gags involves mock posters for the mindless high-concept vehicles that make Sandler’s character both fabulously well–to-do and mired in self-hatred. Apatow captured the existential angst of a fundamentally serious, melancholy man doomed by circumstances and the whims of the public to eternally inhabit the role of the class clown.
If a happily married, scandal-free family man like Sandler is the exception, then Dangerfield is the rule. He was the archetypal sad clown, a hard-drinking, depressive stoner and heavy cocaine user whose self-deprecating shtick couldn’t quite conceal genuine self-hatred and a palpable sense of desperation that persisted no matter how successful he became. In another anecdote about Dangerfield I believe I heard on WTF, a comedian recalled Dangerfield, who had his own eponymous comedy club, making a rare appearance at the legendary Comedy Store to try out new material, only to have someone in the audience yell out, “Why are you so sad?” The acute observation ended the evening for Dangerfield and marked the last time he’d ever try out material at the Comedy Store.
I thought an awful lot about Sandler’s character in Funny People and Dangerfield while watching 1996’s Larger Than Life, in part because star Bill Murray is also such a famously melancholy and tormented funny man. After Larger Than Life and 1997’s The Man Who Knew Too Little—both of which bombed—Murray went from being a funnyman with a faintly tragic air to a professional depressive who lurched sad-eyed through a midlife crisis in film after film, a pervasive on-screen funk that stretches from 1998’s Rushmore through to 2003’s Lost In Translation, 2004’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, and 2005’s Broken Flowers.
Following Rushmore, Murray successfully reinvented himself as a serious—one might even argue too serious—character actor. But 1996 found him in a strange professional limbo. Of the Not Ready For Prime Time Players, John Belushi and Gilda Radner were dead, Dan Aykroyd was well on his way to being a bit-player/vodka pitchman/blues promoter-exploiter/conspiracy theorist, Chevy Chase was stumbling lazily toward irrelevance, and Murray, arguably the most talented and accomplished of them all, found himself performing opposite an unruly pachyderm in a misbegotten film for kids. How could Larger Than Life not have incited epic soul-searching and a major career overhaul? How could a comic genius like Murray spend his days worrying he’d be stomped to death by a giant animal and not wonder where in the hell he went wrong? Larger Than Life is less a movie than a 93-minute assault on Murray’s battered dignity/professional wake-up call.
People always seem surprised to see classy actors prostitute themselves for a paycheck. I find that ridiculous. Sure, in a perfect world Ben Kingsley would be able to devote himself completely to performing Shakespeare, but I don’t begrudge him mercenary appearances in Uwe Boll movies or Lucky Number Slevin. Actors get slathered in make-up to play expensive games of pretend while reading other people’s lines—if anything, they should be held to a lower standard than everyone else. They’re professional pretenders, for fuck’s sake, not nuns. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to feel shivers of sympathy for Murray as he spends the film playing second fiddle to a performing animal with a tiny brain and a body capable of destroying all in its path. That shit was beneath Matt LeBlanc’s dignity in Ed. Here it’s something resembling a modest tragedy.
Larger Than Life at least looks modestly promising on paper. It was written by beloved Southern humorist Roy Blount Jr. and re-teamed Murray with Howard Franklin, his co-director on the terrific cult heist comedy Quick Change. It was shot by the great Elliot Davis (Out Of Sight), gives Murray an ostensibly juicy role as a third-rate inspirational speaker in desperate need of inspiration himself, and boasts an impressive supporting cast: Harve Presnell, Janeane Garofalo, Linda Fiorentino, Jeremy Piven (as a hard-charging agent of all things), and a young, shockingly clothed Matthew McConaughey in a scene-stealing bit part as a manic, conspiracy-theory-obsessed trucker.
Not surprisingly, Larger Than Life peaks early, with Murray taking the podium at what is only the latest in an endless string of dispiriting speaking engagements at soul-crushing conventions and trade shows and announcing, in a perfect deadpan, “My father died before I was born trying to save a child drowning in icy water. It took me a long time before I stopped resenting that.” Such scenes, rooted in Murray’s flailing job as an inspirer-for-hire, find Murray inhabiting a role he played often and brilliantly on Saturday Night Live: the consummate show-business phony, oozing smarm and manufactured bonhomie.
Then the plot kicks in, and the film begins a long, often tedious ramble to nowhere slowly. Murray’s father, it appears, didn’t die before he was born at all. Murray’s appearance-obsessed mother simply pretended that he’d died a hero’s death to hide her shame in having conceived a child with a traveling circus clown, as Murray learns when tenacious lawyer Presnell informs him that his father only recently died and left behind a very large inheritance. This delights Murphy until he discovers that the large inheritance in question is his father’s beloved elephant Vera.